Africa invented pottery a second time, three thousand kilometres east of Mali

The fourth invention of ceramic technology also happened in Africa. During the ninth and eighth millennia BCE, people living three thousand kilometres east of Mali, in the southern half of the eastern Sahara, began making pots of their own. On present evidence this owes nothing to the West African centre. It appears everywhere in country whose inhabitants have spoken Nilo-Saharan languages for thousands of years, and its decorative motifs are arranged differently from those on the older western wares. The spread runs east to west, into the lands between modern Sudan and Mali, which is the wrong direction for a West African origin. So Africans invented a foundational technology twice, independently, in two separate language communities. The Malian potters were working at least three millennia before anyone in the Middle East, and four millennia before the technique started moving from the Middle East into eastern Europe. Both African inventions predate the civilisations most curricula still treat as the beginning of everything.

After the pre-proto-Semitic speakers left Egypt for the northeast, the ancestral Boreafrasian language stayed behind and then split in two. One branch became proto-Chado-Amazigh, the common ancestor of the Chadic and the Amazigh languages. The other ran down to ancient Egyptian. The westward departure of the Chado-Amazigh speakers fits the early Holocene, about ten thousand years ago, when a shift to wetter conditions let people settle across much of the northern and north-central Sahara, and the archaeology of that period shows them doing exactly that. The communities that remained on the Nile kept speaking the tongue that would become early ancient Egyptian several millennia later. Egyptian was the last branch of the Afrasian tree still growing in Egypt. It is what was left after seven thousand years of departures, northeast into the Levant and west into the grasslands, by a population that kept shedding daughter communities while staying on the river that would carry its name.