Farmers reach the rainforest and the northern woods as kingdoms appear

In the three thousand years before 300 CE the scale of political organisation changed. Populations were denser, kingdoms formed, and in several regions kingdoms grew into empires. Farmers meanwhile reworked their crops and their methods to live in country that had been marginal for agriculture: the northern temperate belts of Europe and North America, the rainforests of Africa and South America, and Pacific islands that had never held people at all. The parallel is worth holding onto. African farmers were adapting to the equatorial forest in the same centuries that European farmers were adapting to cold northern soils. From the early second millennium BCE, new techniques of manufacture and a wider range of goods made regular long-distance trade worth the trouble, and by the first millennium BCE those networks were carrying social, political and commercial consequences across Africa and Eurasia together. Africa generated its own commercial networks and traded on them as a full partner.

Hispaniola had ground sloths, large slow herbivores of a kind that had vanished from most of the Americas thousands of years earlier. Archaeological evidence places them still living in the Cordillera Central, the mountainous spine of the island, during the second millennium BCE and as late as roughly 800 BCE. They survived in the interior long after the coasts were settled. What ended them appears to have been the people. Rouse connects the extinction to the development of Courian hunting technology, a set of improved stone tools that made the highlands worth working. Once the interior could be hunted efficiently, a slow animal with no experience of predators had a short future ahead of it. This is the earliest documented case of human beings changing the ecology of the island that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The pattern set here, of an interior resource used until it is gone, repeats on the same mountains three thousand years later with the trees.

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.