Iron leaves the Great Lakes for the Atlantic by three separate roads

At the close of the first millennium BCE the Mashariki Bantu expansions carried iron working across eastern and southeastern Africa. From no later than the middle of that millennium the technology also began moving the other way, westward from the African Great Lakes, across Bantu speaking central Africa, from the Western Rift all the way to the Atlantic. Mapping the words for iron, forging and tools shows three distinct lines of travel. One ran through the equatorial rainforest, along the middle Congo and north of it. One followed the Sankuru River country at the southern edge of the forest. The third crossed the savanna belt below the forest. West of the point where the Ubangi meets the Congo, the northern line met a separate spread coming south out of Cameroon and the western Central African Republic. What that adds up to is a technology radiating in every direction from a central African source, through African languages, African migration routes and African trade, filling a continent by several roads at once.

Horizon I on Martinique produced some of the earliest radiocarbon dates in the West Indies for the Cedrosan Saladoid, the pottery-making farming people who moved north into the islands from the South American mainland. Rouse treats the date as the opening of a long demographic change rather than a single landing. The islands were already occupied by Archaic-age bands, smaller groups who fished, gathered and hunted and who did not farm. Over the following centuries the farmers displaced them. Martinique sits in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, on the road running from the mouth of the Orinoco up the arc towards Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and anything travelling that road passes it. I put a Martinique radiocarbon date on a Haitian timeline because the people the Spanish met on Hispaniola in 1492 came out of this movement. Their arrival is datable, gradual and about two thousand years long. Haiti has an indigenous beginning that predates every European in the story.

The Council of Nicaea met in 325 CE to settle what Christians were required to believe about the nature of Christ. The argument was carried by Alexander, the Egyptian patriarch of Alexandria, and by his student Athanasius, who between them defeated the position that Christ was a created being. Out of the council came the doctrine of the Trinity and the statement of belief still recited as the Nicene Creed. Every later century of Christian theology in Europe was built on that foundation, and it was fixed in place by two men from Egypt. The other decisive figure of the period was also African. Augustine was born in the fourth century at Hippo, in what is now Algeria, of Amazigh descent, and his writing on sin, grace, predestination and the standing of the church shaped Catholic doctrine for sixteen hundred years and handed the Protestant reformers their arguments as well. He learned his trade inside an African intellectual tradition that had already produced Tertullian and Cyprian.

Christianity had been seeping into Nubia on a small scale for some time, but the formal conversion of the rulers and, soon after, of most of the population came in the middle of the sixth century with missionaries from Byzantium. Julian, a Monophysite encouraged by the empress Theodora, went south in 543. The rival Melkite mission never got there in time. Theodora persuaded or ordered the governor of the Thebaid to hold it up in Upper Egypt while Julian travelled on. The doctrinal quarrel of a Byzantine court decided which form of Christianity took root on the middle Nile. The kingdom that grew from it kept a literate culture with Byzantine and Coptic colouring, its own line of bishops at Faras, and a cathedral there that the fifth bishop, Paulos, rebuilt in 707, recorded on two foundation stones, one in Greek and one in Coptic.