Monotheism was old in Africa before it was new in the Middle East

The standard account of one God has a fixed shape. The idea appears among the ancient Israelites, the prophets refine it, Christianity and Islam universalise it, and missionaries and empires carry it to everyone else. That places the Levant at the centre and the last three thousand years in the frame. Ehret puts a different set of dates on the table. Between 9700 and 5000 BCE, across the long transition from foraging to farming, monotheistic religion already predominated among the speakers of the Niger-Congo languages and among the speakers of the Nilo-Saharan languages. Between them those two families cover most of the people on the continent. Their belief in a single creator is thousands of years older than anything comparable further east. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of what happened later to African religion in the Americas. The men who called Vodou a primitive survival were measuring it against a monotheism that Africa had arrived at first.

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.

Anthropologists building their discipline in the nineteenth century kept finding regions where peoples of quite different origins had spent centuries in contact and had come to share deep features of culture, well past the superficial. Upper Egypt and the eastern Sudan belt were such a region from the sixth millennium BCE onward. Ehret calls the long south to north stretch the Middle Nile Culture Area. The label changes the question of Egyptian origins. Egypt did not come out of one ethnic group or one language community. It came out of a zone of sustained interaction among peoples with different linguistic and historical backgrounds, who over thousands of years of contact built a common stock of practices, ritual forms and material traditions. That makes Egyptian civilisation a regional outcome. To follow it you have to look south, into Nubia and Sudan, because half the culture area lay there and so did the origins of much that museum labels now file as distinctively Egyptian.