The earliest Saladoid dates in the islands come from Martinique

Horizon I on Martinique produced some of the earliest radiocarbon dates in the West Indies for the Cedrosan Saladoid, the pottery-making farming people who moved north into the islands from the South American mainland. Rouse treats the date as the opening of a long demographic change rather than a single landing. The islands were already occupied by Archaic-age bands, smaller groups who fished, gathered and hunted and who did not farm. Over the following centuries the farmers displaced them. Martinique sits in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, on the road running from the mouth of the Orinoco up the arc towards Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and anything travelling that road passes it. I put a Martinique radiocarbon date on a Haitian timeline because the people the Spanish met on Hispaniola in 1492 came out of this movement. Their arrival is datable, gradual and about two thousand years long. Haiti has an indigenous beginning that predates every European in the story.

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.