10,000 to 7000 BCE · Africanspan

Before the fourth millennium, Egypt was grassland and the river was a hazard

High floods emptied the banks while the green Sahara opened the country away from the water.

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10,000 to 6000 BCE · Africanspan

Agriculture was invented at least thirteen times, three of them in Africa

Fonio in West Africa, sorghum in the eastern Sahara, enset in the Ethiopian highlands, all separately.

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10,000 to 6000 BCE · Africanspan

African herders had cattle under care by the eighth millennium BCE

Donkeys along the Red Sea Hills, cattle in the eastern Sahara, as early as the first Crescent flocks.

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10,000 to 6000 BCE · Africanspan

Farming fed more people and gave them malaria

Grain stores drew rats, night pens put cattle indoors, and cleared fields held water for mosquitoes.

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10,000 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

New Guinea and the Caucasus repeat the pattern that Africa set

Trans-New Guinea languages spread with taro and banana; North Caucasian speakers carried farming west.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

Farming was invented eleven or twelve times and Africa did three of them

The Holocene opens with climate upheaval and closes with food production on every inhabited continent.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

The Holocene brought disruption, and disruption produced farming

The end of the Younger Dryas rearranged environments and forced a new way of getting food.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

A lake six hundred kilometres long once sat where the Sahara is

Sutton's Aqualithic ran on Nile perch and hippopotamus along the waterways of a green Sahara.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

Sacred kingship came from fishing communities before it reached any throne

Expanding herders absorbed the Aquatic peoples and took their political institutions along with them.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

Food production made people, people needed land, and land carried language

Every great language family is the fossil record of a population that learned to grow its own food.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

Ethiopian highlanders invented farming a third time, with the false banana

Omotic speakers took the false banana across the southern highlands over three thousand years.

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9700 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan

The first great Nilo-Saharan expansion ran on fish

Intensified foraging moved as many people across the early Holocene as cultivation did.

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9700 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan

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

Two of the continent's largest language families held the belief thousands of years before Abraham.

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c. 9500 BCE · Africanapproximate

West Africans made pottery long before the Near East did

The third invention of ceramics in world history happened south of the Niger bend, in Mali.

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9500 to 8000 BCE · Africanspan

Women invented both African ceramic traditions

Across the continent potting is women's work, guarded by ritual, and the pattern runs to the beginning.

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