Stratification produced patriarchy in Eurasia and not everywhere

If steeply unequal societies were emerging in several regions at once, a question follows. Did the subordination of women arrive with them everywhere? Comparative ethnographic evidence from Africa south of the Sahara, from Native American societies and from Oceania says it did not. In many of those societies each sex held authority over its own sphere of social and economic activity, and the views of women, senior women in particular, had to be weighed in community decisions. Across the long middle belt of Eurasia the record reads differently. There female subordination does seem to arrive early in nearly every society that developed strong stratification. That correlation has been treated as a law of social development. It is the behaviour of one region. The places where the correlation breaks down are exactly the places Western scholarship left out when it built its theory of what complexity does to women, which is how a regional habit came to be reported as a human universal.

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.

Watermelon was well established in Egypt before the middle of the second millennium BCE, and the botanical remains say so. The word Egyptians used for the crop says something more. It was taken from Nilo-Saharan languages spoken upriver, south of Egypt, and the borrowing happened centuries before the earliest surviving specimens. Language keeps a record that dirt does not. A word crosses when people cross, which means knowledge of the crop reached Egypt earlier than any preserved seed can prove. The direction is the part worth holding onto. Egyptian borrowed from Nilo-Saharan, which places the crop in the hands of peoples to the south first and puts Egypt downstream in the cultural sense as well as the geographical one. Cattle keeping, sacral kingship and the older religion of the river travelled that same way, from the middle Nile northward. The watermelon on an Egyptian table was a Sudanese fruit that had been on the move for a very long time.