Towns in West Africa were built by trade before any king built them

In the second millennium BCE a new kind of town appeared in the belt of savanna south of the Sahara. Its reason for existing was manufacture and transport. Craftsmen made goods for sale at distance, and the settlement sat where routes met. With the towns came a class of people who had not existed before, merchants who bought, sold and put up the capital to move cargo. In West Africa the skilled producers organised as well, banding together to hold their position in the new arrangement. The order of events matters. In the western and central Sudan belt, and later and separately in the Congo basin, this economy took shape before states did. It grew straight out of villages and medium range trade, with no era of kings and priesthoods in between. Towns and long distance commerce were established in West Africa early in the second millennium BCE. Chiefdoms and kingdoms came several centuries later, which left the new commerce in more hands than the Levantine version ever reached.

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.

Phoenician traders founded Utica on the North African shore in 1100 BCE, and by that date their colonies were already scattered along the coast of what ancient writers called Libya. Herodotus described the people of that coast as a confederation of families of several origins. The populations there had formed through the mixing of indigenous black tribes with tribes that came in from Asia, so the northern edge of Africa was a meeting ground long before Rome or Islam reached it. This belongs on a Haitian timeline because Haitians descend from peoples whose history was declared empty by the men who sold them. A coast with dated cities, named traders and recorded confederations is the opposite of a blank. The Africa that supplied captives to Saint Domingue two and a half thousand years later was never a continent without a record, and the Phoenician settlements are among the earliest fixed points anyone can put on its map.

Omotic languages are spoken today across southern Ethiopia. They were once spoken much further north. The evidence is a set of Omotic loanwords sitting inside the Agaw languages of northern Ethiopia, which can only have entered by contact, and the contact has to predate 2000 BCE. That puts Omotic speakers across a large stretch of the Ethiopian Highlands four thousand years ago, well beyond the territory their descendants hold. What moved them was the expansion of Cushitic speaking peoples, which pushed the Omotic communities southward over the following millennia until the map came to look as it does now. The words stayed behind. Borrowed vocabulary is durable in a way that settlements are not, and a handful of Omotic terms embedded in Agaw speech is the surviving trace of a linguistic geography that has otherwise been erased. Ehret works this way throughout, on the principle that languages remember migrations which left nothing at all in the ground.