The bones of Egypt's founders match Nubia and the Horn

The cemeteries at El Badari and Naqada hold the people who founded Egypt, and their remains have been measured. Cranial and dental features in those fourth millennium BCE burials show no debt to Levantine populations. Their closest parallels lie among the long-resident peoples of northeastern Africa, Nubia and the northern Horn of Africa above all. Those buried there descend from inhabitants of these parts of Africa going back many millennia. This is the most material evidence available, the bodies themselves, and it is not ambiguous. Any theory of Egyptian origins that opens with a founding migration out of Asia has to explain why the founders' own skeletons place them in the Nile valley and the Horn. Egypt was made by Africans who had been living in Africa for a very long time. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because the instinct that emptied Egypt of Africans is the one that later emptied Saint-Domingue of the people who built it.

Vignier III sits in Haiti and it carries a radiocarbon date around 3630 BCE. That is the earliest firmly dated human habitation we have on the island. I want to sit with the number for a second, because the arithmetic does something to you. From Vignier III to 1804 is about fifty four centuries. From 1804 to today is a little over two. So more than ninety six percent of the human story on this island happened before the country existed, and almost all of that ninety six percent gets compressed into a single sentence about Taínos in most school curricula. That compression is not an accident of space. It is the shape colonial history gives to a place, where the clock only starts when Europeans arrive to look at it. This entry exists to start the clock earlier.

Around the thirty-fourth century BCE the climate of the eastern Sahara turned sharply drier and stayed that way. Steppe and semidesert grassland that had carried herds for millennia became the desert it is now, though patches held on well enough to support marginal livestock raising as late as about 2000 BCE. The pastoralists living out there had to go somewhere. They moved out of the emerging desert and settled among the communities already living along the Nile. That is the event that produced the Egypt of the textbooks, the thin green ribbon dependent on an annual flood. Before it, this was open country with mobile herders and a river running through it. After it, thousands of people and their cattle were compressed onto a floodplain a few kilometres wide. The competition for land and the density of population that followed drove polities to grow and swallow one another until the whole valley was unified around 3100 BCE.

Where social and economic stratification rose in several parts of Africa, it did not carry female subordination with it. The list is long. The authority of the Kandake at Meroe. Economically independent women running major commerce in West Africa down to recent centuries. Queen mothers holding power in West and Central African kingdoms, alongside other institutions through which women acted on the state. Women holding chiefships in the kingdoms of the southern savanna belt. And in Matamba a queen who was the customary monarch. In the matrilineal savanna societies a suitor needed the consent of the bride's mother and her sisters, worked bride service under their direction for months or years, and deferred to his mother in law for the rest of her life. Those customs turn up in societies whose Bantu languages sit on different deep branches, which puts them in place by the proto-Savanna Bantu period of the early second millennium BCE. Patriarchy is not the entry fee for complex society.