c. 5000 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Banwari Trace in Trinidad is the oldest known settlement in the Caribbean

Stone tools and refuse from around 5000 BCE mark the first move from the mainland into the islands.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 5000 BCE to 1492 CE · Indigenousspan

The Lesser Antilles are too varied to have a single history

Size, geology and climate differ island by island, and so did the societies built on them.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 5000 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Work on the first Caribbean settlers was published in Spanish and ignored

Cuban and Dominican archaeologists did the primary research; North American syntheses left it out.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 5000 BCE to 1492 CE · Indigenousspan

Each island produced its own society and the ground still shows it

Settlement across the Greater Antilles met a range of environments and diverged accordingly.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

5000 BCE onward · Africanspan

Cotton weaving was invented at least three times with three different plants

Peru, Mesoamerica, India and Africa each domesticated a cotton species growing on their own ground.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

Before 5000 BCE · Africanapproximate

The donkey was the first multipurpose beast of burden in the world

Africa domesticated the animal that made long distance trade and wheeled transport possible.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 5000 BCE · Africanapproximate

Cushitic speakers in the Horn domesticated the donkey twice

Genetics finds two events, in Somaliland and on the Red Sea Hills, and a Cushitic word dates them.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

5000 to 3100 BCE · Africanspan

Two thousand years of the Middle Nile end in a pharaoh

From Nabta Playa to Qustul to the Old Kingdom the thread never breaks.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

5000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Crops moved east and herds moved west across Africa's own networks

Reconstructed vocabulary in three language families dates goats in West Africa to the fifth millennium.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

5000 to 3000 BCE onward · Africanspan

Africa's most consequential export was a pack animal

Human porters set the limit on trade distance until the donkey came out of the Red Sea Hills.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

5000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Cotton was woven in Sudan a thousand years before India

Raffia weaving in West Africa was a second and separate African invention of the loom.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 4500 BCE · Africanapproximate

Herders in the Egyptian desert align standing stones on stars

Nabta Playa had a calendar circle and five stellar alignments a thousand years before Giza.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 4500 BCE · Africanapproximate

The graves at Nabta Playa show a ranked society with priests

Stone alignments need someone trained to build them, and the burials say who that someone was.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

4500 to 4000 BCE · Africanspan

Sirius and Orion were being watched at Nabta before any pharaoh

The two stars that anchor Egyptian religion appear in desert stone alignments a millennium early.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

4190 BCE · Indigenousyear only

The oldest dated people in Cuba lived under a rock ledge at Levisa

A deposit of 4190 BCE puts human beings in the Greater Antilles long before the school version allows.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page