The Bantu expansion carries one language family across a third of Africa

Between 3000 BCE and 300 CE farming reached nearly all the land on earth that would support it, and everywhere it arrived it brought the same consequences for population, settlement and social organisation. In Africa the largest instance is the spread of speakers of Bantu languages, a subgroup of Niger-Congo, across most of the southern third of the continent. It began in the Cameroon and Nigeria borderlands, crossed the equatorial rainforest and came out onto the savannas of eastern and southern Africa. It stands beside the Austronesian settlement of the Pacific, the Indo-European spread across Eurasia and the Turkic spread across Central Asia as one of the great demographic movements in human history. The engine in each case was the same. Food production allowed population growth, population growth allowed territorial expansion, and expansion carried language, technique and custom into new country.

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.