The word for horse in Mali came from Carthage

In languages spoken all around the great bend of the Niger and widely across Mali, the word for horse takes the form so or siso. Those forms derive from the Punic word for horse, the language of Carthage. A loanword travels with the thing it names, so the vocabulary dates the arrival of horses in the western Sudan belt to the period when Carthaginian commerce was still running, which ends when Rome destroyed the city in 146 BCE. The route came south through the Hoggar mountains of the central Sahara. Horses arrived as a trade good sold by Carthaginian merchants to West African elites, along tracks in use centuries before the camel and later serving as the arteries of the trans-Saharan gold trade. Ehret's evidence here is entirely linguistic. It fixes a direction and a date for the traffic in horses without a single excavated animal, on the strength of a word that stayed behind in Mande and its neighbours.

By about 250 BCE, on the radiocarbon evidence Rouse reviews, the Cedrosan Saladoid migration had reached the northern West Indies. The colonists were selective about where they stopped. They favoured high, mountainous islands, which hold rain, carry rivers and support the luxuriant forest their farming needed. Flat, dry islands were passed over. That preference explains a good deal of later Caribbean settlement, including on Hispaniola, whose mountains and well watered valleys made it one of the most heavily populated islands in the region by 1492. This is farming logic applied to an archipelago by people who had crossed open water to reach it. They knew which land would grow their crops and they chose accordingly, across a chain more than a thousand kilometres long. The indigenous history of Haiti begins with decisions of this kind, taken two thousand years before the Spanish arrived and recorded now in charcoal, potsherds and dates.

A Greek commercial handbook of about 340 BC, later wrongly credited to Skylax, placed the island of Cerne twelve days' sail from the Straits of Gibraltar and said no ship could get past it for shallows, mud and weed. Phoenician merchants moored there, pitched tents on the island and ferried goods to the mainland in small boats. They took away hides of deer, lion, leopard and cattle, and the hides and tusks of elephants. The people they dealt with used ivory ornaments and cups, put ivory anklets on their women and ivory decoration on their horses, drove chariots, and made a great deal of wine from vines, which the merchants also carried off. In return came perfume, Egyptian stone, Attic pottery and jars. The tents suggest that the permanent colony Hanno had planted on Cerne was already abandoned. Cerne has never been located.

Words for iron and for the work of the forge spread eastward across central Africa until they stopped in the west of South Sudan, along what is now the Ethiopian border. They stopped because another body of ironworking terms was coming the other way, southward out of the northern Ethiopian highlands. The two met in eastern South Sudan around the middle of the first millennium BCE. Each set carries its own words for the furnace, the smith and the tools, and each traces back to a different chain of transmission, one African in origin and one reaching the highlands from the Middle East across the Red Sea. Had iron been born once in Anatolia and radiated outward from there, the vocabulary across this whole region would descend from a single root. Instead there are two lexical systems running into each other from opposite directions, thousands of kilometres from where either began. That meeting place is where the single origin theory stops working.