Every continent humans reached lost its big animals, except the one we came from

As people spread through the Americas the large animals went. In North America, between roughly twenty thousand and ten thousand years ago, thirty-five genera disappeared: ground sloths, dire wolves, the saber cat, the American lion, along with horses, camels, mammoths and mastodons. South America lost another fifty-two genera over the same stretch, close to four fifths of its megafauna, though three animals held on longer. The giant armadillo, the giant ground sloth and a saber-toothed cat may still have been alive two or three thousand years after 9700 BCE. The same thing had already happened in Eurasia. Australia lost fourteen genera by 30,000 BCE. Africa is the exception, and the reason is that African elephants, rhinos, hippos and big cats had grown up alongside humans and had time to learn us. Everywhere else our arrival was an ecological event of the first order. The idea that people lived lightly on the earth until industry arrived does not survive the extinction tables.

Trinidad stayed joined to the South American mainland until the Holocene, and the consequences are still visible in what lives there. Its plants and animals are continental in range, and the island holds a long list of species that never reached the rest of the Antilles. It covers about four thousand eight hundred square kilometres, which makes it the sixth largest in the chain. Most of it is low hills and badly drained lowland, with a rough northern coast as the exception. That combination of position and biological range is why archaeologists routinely call Trinidad the gateway to the Caribbean. It is worth being precise about what the label means. Anything moving out of the Orinoco country and into the island chain had to come this way, so the settlement history of every island downstream begins with what people were doing here. A Caribbean that starts in 1492 skips the door and describes only the room.

Around the middle of the fourteenth millennium BCE the Mushabian culture became established in Sinai and the Negev, carrying tools and toolmaking techniques characteristic of the late Afian of Egypt and the cultures that followed it there. The archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef argued that the Mushabian merged with the Geometric Kebaran, a local Levantine tradition, and that the merger produced the Natufian around 13,000 BCE. The Natufian lasted until the middle of the tenth millennium BCE, when farming began in the Middle East, and its makers are generally taken to be the cultural forebears of the early Semitic speakers. Follow that chain backwards. Grain harvesting in the Ethiopian highlands before 16,000 BCE, the Afian in Egypt by 15,000 BCE, the Mushabian in Sinai, the Natufian in the Levant, then the first farming villages of the Middle East. Every step runs south to north. The culture textbooks treat as the source of the Neolithic has an African grandparent.

The third independent invention of ceramics in the world belongs to Africa. By eleven and a half thousand years ago, around 9500 BCE, people in what is now Mali were making pots. The country in question lies south of the great bend of the Niger, and it falls inside the region where the ancestral form of Niger-Congo would have been spoken, the homeland of the largest language family on the continent today. Twelve thousand kilometres separate it from the Yangtze, which rules out anyone carrying the idea across. This is a dated, located archaeological finding and it has been available for years. Potters in western Africa were firing clay thousands of years before anyone in the Near East or in Europe did. The interesting question is no longer whether it happened. It is why a world history syllabus that has had this information for a generation still opens the story of ceramics in Mesopotamia and never gets to Mali at all.