The oldest evidence of cotton spinning in the world comes from Sudan

The earliest evidence anywhere for the processing of cotton comes from what is now Sudan. It is indirect. No fabric survives from that depth, but the spindle whorls used to spin thread do, and they turn up at sites of the Khartoum culture with calibrated dates in the sixth millennium BCE. Each has the flat round form characteristic of African whorls. That puts Sudanese spinning about a thousand years ahead of the oldest securely dated Indian cotton, and one to two thousand years ahead of the oldest American cotton, from Peru. Ceramics: African first. Iron smelting: African first. Cotton processing: African first. Past a certain point a run of results stops reading as coincidence and starts reading as the technological record of a continent whose peoples were among the most inventive in the ancient world. People at Khartoum were spinning thread eight thousand years ago, in a period the standard curriculum passes over in silence.

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.

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.

One animal went out from Africa to the rest of the world and changed how goods move. Modern contempt for the donkey obscures the scale of that. Centuries of Western usage have turned the animal's name into a term of abuse for stupidity, and the abuse has done real damage to the record. The donkey was the first multipurpose beast of burden in history. It carried loads and it carried riders. In the Middle East people harnessed it early to wheeled vehicles. Long distance trade in goods depended on owning donkeys, and so did the first wheeled transport anywhere. The uses people found for it very likely supplied the model for domesticating and working horses and camels later on. Every chariot in Egypt, every camel caravan crossing Arabia, every cavalry charge in the ancient world descends conceptually from an animal that Africans brought under care thousands of years before a horse carried anyone.