Ten thousand years of climate swings force everyone to start over

From the coldest point of the last ice age down to roughly 9700 BCE, the world's climate refused to settle. Cold phases gave way to warm ones and back again, wet rainfall regimes turned dry and then wet once more, and each swing arrived faster than any community could plan for. People everywhere responded by rebuilding how they fed themselves: new places to camp, new animals to hunt, new plants to gather, new tools to do it with. Nothing about this period turns on a single dramatic event. Its importance lies in the accumulated repair work of thousands of separate communities. In Africa the same pressures produced the same inventiveness they produced in Eurasia and the Americas. The standard telling of this age keeps its cast small, European cave painters and hunters walking east across the Bering land bridge, and leaves the African record out. That omission is a decision, and it has consequences downstream.

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.