Cotton was woven in Sudan a thousand years before India

Cotton was being woven in Sudan by 5000 BCE. India arrived at cotton weaving about a millennium later and did so on its own, and people in South and Middle America worked it out shortly after that, also on their own. Silk weaving in China dates to the fourth millennium BCE. Linen from domesticated flax was probably being woven in the Middle East and Egypt equally early. Far from the eastern Sudan, in West Africa, people invented loom technology a second time and applied it to raffia no later than the fourth millennium. The map of weaving looks like the map of agriculture: several centres, several continents, Africa among the first. The inventors were mostly villagers. Cotton weaving and raffia weaving both happened in country that had neither cities nor states, and the earliest known copper smelting from ore, in the later sixth millennium BCE, happened in the Balkans. Transformative technique does not require a state to produce it.

Barrera-Mordan, in the Dominican Republic, is one of the sites that forced archaeologists to move the date of human arrival in the northern Caribbean. The material there is a stone-working complex built on flaked tools struck from cores, and it dates to around 4000 BCE. The people who made it belong to what is labelled the Lithic age. They had no pottery, and they should not be confused with the ceramic-producing groups who reached the islands thousands of years afterwards and are far better known. What the assemblage records is a specialised adaptation, worked out for a set of islands with particular stone, particular coastlines and particular food. Sites like this are how the initial migration routes from the surrounding mainland get mapped, because the tool types are the trail. Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares, was inhabited about six thousand years ago by people who knew exactly what they were doing with rock.

In the matrilineal societies spread right across Africa's southern savanna belt, a young man who wanted to marry applied to the mother of the woman and to her mother's female relatives, acting as a group. Their consent was the one that counted, ahead of her father's and ahead of her mother's brother's. To win it he performed bride service, working for months and sometimes for several years under their direction. After he was accepted and married he was still required to show marked deference to his mother in law for the rest of her life. Marriage is the central economic and reproductive transaction any society makes, and here the women of the lineage controlled it. They judged the suitor, set the labour, and admitted him or refused him. The practice turns up in societies speaking languages from deep and separate branches of Bantu, which puts it in place long before those branches parted. For thousands of years, across a third of the continent, this was ordinary.

Crops domesticated in West Africa had taken root in southern Arabia by 3000 BCE. Once they were established in Yemen and Oman they went aboard ship, and before the third millennium was out they were growing on the Indian subcontinent. The archaeologist Dorian Fuller and his colleagues assembled the evidence: a sphere of intercontinental contact more than four thousand years old, running from Africa through southern Arabia into South Asia. The usual account of ancient long-distance trade opens with Mesopotamia and the Indus valley and gives Africa a line in the notes. Fuller's material puts African plant breeding at the head of the chain, with West African crops travelling thousands of kilometres through Arabian hands and changing what Indian farmers grew. Ehret's own summary is that historians have nearly everything still to learn here. A whole sphere of ancient exchange sat unexamined because the discipline had already settled that Africa contributed nothing to the connected world.