10,000 to 6000 BCE · Africanspan

Farming arrives in West Africa, and so does malaria

The same move that fed more people also built the mosquito a house.

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6000 BCE onward · Africanspan

Upper Egypt and the eastern Sudan belt were one cultural region

Ehret's Middle Nile Culture Area runs south to north across a language border for millennia.

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6000 BCE onward · Africanspan

The shared culture of the middle Nile crossed a language border at Aswan

Eastern Sahelian speakers to the south, the ancestors of Egyptian to the north, one set of practices.

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6000 BCE onward · Africanspan

Ritual held the middle Nile together, and ritual travels harder than pots

Common ceramic styles are the visible part; the ceremonies underneath took generations of living together.

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c. 6000 BCE · Africanapproximate

A clan ritual chief in West Africa held authority without holding power

The kumo traces to proto-South Volta-Congo in the early sixth millennium BCE, in matrilineal clans.

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c. 6000 BCE · Africanapproximate

The possessor of rain kept his influence and never became a ruler

A third African tradition of inherited authority, among Cushitic speakers, six thousand years back.

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6000 to 5500 BCE onward · Africanspan

A pastoral community stretched from the Sudanese confluence to Middle Egypt

Fekri Hassan opened this case in 1988 and David Wengrow's team has since put numbers under it.

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6000 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan

The oldest evidence of cotton spinning in the world comes from Sudan

Flat round spindle whorls from the Khartoum culture, calibrated to the sixth millennium BCE.

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6000 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan

The macehead reaches Egypt from Sudan a long way ahead of Narmer

Ehret follows a burial object north until it ends up in the most famous artefact in Egyptology.

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6000 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan

Cattle and grain cross three thousand kilometres of Sahel in one millennium

Nilo-Saharan herders reach the Hoggar and the Niger bend carrying language and kinship with the herds.

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6000 to 4000 BCE · Africanspan

Divine kingship was invented by fishing communities in a green Sahara

Ehret traces sacral rule back past the herders to the people who lived off the lakes.

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6000 to 3500 BCE · Africanspan

The stratified societies of the fourth millennium inherited their ranks

Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus and coastal Peru hardened inequalities that smaller societies had built.

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6000 to 3300 BCE · Africanspan

For three thousand years most Egyptians did not live on the Nile

Grassland ran from Middle Egypt deep into the Sudan, and the herds were out in it.

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6000 to 3100 BCE · Africanspan

Early Egyptian borrowed its words for southern things from the south

The direction of the loans matches the direction the pots and the burial customs travelled.

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6000 to 3100 BCE · Africanspan

Jar, byre, bull, bowl, watermelon and beer are all southern words

Six Egyptian terms trace back to Eastern Sahelian languages of the Nilo-Saharan family.

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6000 to 3100 BCE · Africanspan

Melons, gourds and cowpeas travel north into Egypt as wheat comes south

The exchange ran in two directions and only one of them gets mentioned.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Farming systems invented separately begin to meet and trade parts

Crops, herds and techniques crossed between regions that had each worked out agriculture alone.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Villages grow denser as exchanged crops raise the yield

The traffic in seeds and livestock counts for what it did to the size of settlements.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Sheep and goats crossing into the eastern Sahara open the exchange age

The first datable transfer between two independent farming systems happened just before 6000 BCE.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

The crop traffic matters for the towns and states it made possible

Qustul, the Middle Nile culture area and the unification of Egypt all sit downstream of it.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Hamlets become villages as the share of farmed food climbs

The move away from foraging came in small increments and never reversed.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

The first copper went into ornament before it went into tools

Linguistic evidence suggests inequality created the demand that pulled metallurgy forward.

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6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

Cheap iron pushed the rich toward silver and gold

Sacral chiefs on the Nile and stratified towns in coastal Peru both appear alongside the first cotton.

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5500 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan

There is no Textile Age in the periodisation, and Africa led it

Naming epochs after copper and bronze hid the technology Africans got to first.

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c. 5230 BCE to 470 BCE · Indigenousspan

Ortoiroid people worked the Trinidad coast for nearly five thousand years

Radiocarbon runs from about 5230 BCE to 470 BCE at sites along the shore.

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