The first civilisations were also the first tyrannies

Dense early populations with hereditary rulers, priestly control of ritual and the beginnings of towns cluster along river valleys. Rivers laid down richer soil and supplied water for irrigation in dry country, which let far more people live in one place than the surrounding land could carry. Norte Chico in Peru fits the pattern. So do Qustul and late predynastic Egypt. Crowding those numbers together sharpened competition for land and water, and the competition fed unequal access to wealth, which fed unequal access to power. Ehret draws the lesson plainly. These valleys supplied the material conditions for the first oppressive and steeply unequal societies, and he declines to call them civilisations without qualification. The irrigation that fed the population also concentrated authority in whoever controlled the sluices. The conditions that produced monuments produced the organised extraction of other people's labour. Anyone admiring the pyramids is admiring both halves of that arrangement.

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.

Susan and Roderick McIntosh, excavating in the inland delta of the Niger, found exchange running in every direction among the specialist communities of the delta, and between them and the farming populations of the Sahel and savanna around it, and running that way well before 2000 BCE. Sorghum had come west from the eastern Sudan belt by then and joined pearl millet, fonio and livestock in the fields and herds of those communities. The delta held several economies at once, each suited to a different piece of ground and each producing a surplus the others wanted, which made the exchange structural rather than occasional. Towns grew out of that arrangement from below. No commanding centre organised it and no state was required to make it work. Every model of urbanisation that treats a centralising state as the precondition has to account for a place where commerce arrived first and kings arrived afterward.