c. 9500 BCE · Africanapproximate
West Africans made pottery long before the Near East did
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The third independent invention of ceramics in the world belongs to Africa. By eleven and a half thousand years ago, around 9500 BCE, people in what is now Mali were making pots. The country in question lies south of the great bend of the Niger, and it falls inside the region where the ancestral form of Niger-Congo would have been spoken, the homeland of the largest language family on the continent today. Twelve thousand kilometres separate it from the Yangtze, which rules out anyone carrying the idea across. This is a dated, located archaeological finding and it has been available for years. Potters in western Africa were firing clay thousands of years before anyone in the Near East or in Europe did. The interesting question is no longer whether it happened. It is why a world history syllabus that has had this information for a generation still opens the story of ceramics in Mesopotamia and never gets to Mali at all.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.