Work on the first Caribbean settlers was published in Spanish and ignored

People reached the Caribbean islands in the fifth millennium BCE, and that is where the human history of the region begins. Far less is known about them than about the later communities who made pottery, and the reason is partly a matter of who did the work and in what language. Most of the primary research on the earliest inhabitants was carried out in Cuba and Hispaniola by local archaeologists working within Latin American Social Archaeology. They published in Spanish and used a theoretical framework unlike the one in use to the north. North American syntheses largely left their findings out, and the resulting picture of how the islands were first settled has been thin and in places out of date. This is worth naming plainly. The gap in the record is a gap in reading, and the people best placed to describe the first settlement of the Caribbean were the ones whose work went uncited.

Genetic work on donkeys points to two separate domestications, one among communities in Somaliland and another farther north along the Red Sea Hills. People in both places would have been speaking early languages of the Cushitic branch of Afrasian, and within that branch linguists can follow a word distinguishing the domestic donkey from the wild one back to roughly 5000 BCE. The linguistic date agrees with the genetic date, and both agree with the archaeology, where domestic donkeys show up in Egypt after 4000 BCE. Three independent lines of evidence converging is what makes a case of this depth solid. Two African communities, neighbours in the Horn, took the same animal in hand at about the same time and set off consequences that reached transport, trade, warfare and the organisation of states across the ancient world. The road from Somaliland to Sumer is one of the least told routes in world history.

The site at Banwari Trace in Trinidad holds one of the earliest human occupations known anywhere in the Caribbean, dating to around 5000 BCE. Archaeologists label the period the Lithic or early Archaic Age, and it marks the point at which mainland populations began moving out into the island chain. What survives is mostly stone tools and refuse, the residue of people who hunted and gathered. That is thin material, and it still answers real questions: how the first islanders handled environments none of their ancestors had seen, and how they adjusted as sea levels kept changing under them. Everything that follows in the region, thousands of years of indigenous settlement, agriculture and exchange across the whole archipelago, begins from these deposits. Banwari Trace is where the human record of the Caribbean starts, and it sits about six and a half thousand years before the arrival that most chronologies treat as the beginning.