c. 3000 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Haitian workshops turned out stone blades in quantity

Casimira and Las Alejandrinas show a specialised industry among the island's earliest people.

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c. 3000 to 1000 BCE · Indigenousspan

Every Archaic site in Puerto Rico is filed under one label

Inside the Ortoiroid series sit local styles such as the Coroso complex on Vieques.

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c. 3000 to 200 BCE · Indigenousspan

Pestles link eastern Puerto Rico to a site in Trinidad

The Ortoiroid series moves up the Lesser Antilles from the South American mainland.

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c. 3000 to 2000 BCE · Indigenousspan

The first Antiguans lived on a bad coast to be near good flint

Flinty Bay quarried stone that turns up at every early site in the northern Lesser Antilles.

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c. 3000 to 2000 BCE · Indigenousspan

A flint quarry nobody could live beside held the islands together

Keegan and Hofman read the Antiguan stone trade as a system rather than a run of accidents.

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3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Farmers reach the rainforest and the northern woods as kingdoms appear

African and European farmers were opening new climate zones in the same centuries.

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Before 3000 BCE · Africanapproximate

West African crops reach India before the third millennium ends

Dorian Fuller's work puts an Africa to South Asia trade sphere four thousand years back.

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Before 3000 BCE · Africanapproximate

Hibiscus tea and the country potato are West African exports

Two more crops left the continent by sea and ended up feeding half of Asia.

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3000 BCE to the 1600s CE · Africanspan

The queens of Meroe ruled in their own right for eight centuries

Women invented African pottery, ruled matrilineal Meroe and held the throne of Matamba.

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3000 BCE to the present · Africanspan

Across the southern savanna women decided who could marry in

A suitor worked months or years under the direction of the bride's mother and her sisters.

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3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

The Bantu expansion carries one language family across a third of Africa

Three thousand years of movement from the Cameroon borderlands to the southern savannas.

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3000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan

The people who settled Polynesia carried taro and yam

Rice went as far as Indonesia and stopped; borrowed Papuan crops crossed the Pacific.

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3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

At the margins foragers took up herding on their own terms

Boreal Europe and arid southern Africa were too hard for immigrant farmers to enter.

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3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Qustul had royal regalia before Egypt had pharaohs

Towns and monuments went up along the Nile south of Egypt as early as they did in Upper Egypt.

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3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

The first civilisations were also the first tyrannies

Norte Chico, Qustul and late predynastic Egypt all grew where a river fed dense settlement.

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3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Stratification produced patriarchy in Eurasia and not everywhere

Across the Eurasian middle belt female subordination followed inequality; the rule fails elsewhere.

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3000 BCE to the present · Africanspan

Stratified African kingdoms kept women in office anyway

Queen mothers, women chiefs, the Kandake and the monarch of Matamba make one list.

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c. 3000 BCE · Africanapproximate

Cowpeas were domesticated twice inside Africa

Southern Cushitic speakers bred their own variety while West Africa bred the famous one.

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3000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

A second farming expansion filled the Ubangi basin and left no famous name

Between 3000 and 1000 BCE Ubangian speakers took the country immediately north of the Bantu.

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2500 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan

Five sets of megalithic graves suggest five small states in the Sahara

Holl reads the Aïr burial monuments as the mark of polities holding the copper bearing ground.

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c. 2140 BCE to 620 BCE · Indigenousspan

Orinoco villages match the size of later Taino towns

Annual silt renewed the ground these farmers worked for fifteen centuries.

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