Istwa Nou

From the coldest point of the last ice age down to roughly 9700 BCE, the world's climate refused to settle. Cold phases gave way to warm ones and back again, wet rainfall regimes turned dry and then wet once more, and each swing arrived faster than any community could plan for. People everywhere responded by rebuilding how they fed themselves: new places to camp, new animals to hunt, new plants to gather, new tools to do it with. Nothing about this period turns on a single dramatic event. Its importance lies in the accumulated repair work of thousands of separate communities. In Africa the same pressures produced the same inventiveness they produced in Eurasia and the Americas. The standard telling of this age keeps its cast small, European cave painters and hunters walking east across the Bering land bridge, and leaves the African record out. That omission is a decision, and it has consequences downstream.

The stretch from about 9700 BCE to about 5500 BCE opens with the Holocene and with climate swings big enough to remake natural environments and force people everywhere to rework how they fed themselves. The response that mattered most came in as many as eleven or twelve widely separated regions, where communities moved by stages out of hunting and gathering and into growing crops and keeping livestock. Africans living far apart on their own continent accounted for at least three of those separate inventions. Three, in a story usually told as one. The agricultural revolution is narrated in most classrooms as a Near Eastern development handed outward to a waiting world. It was polycentric, and Africa was one of its principal laboratories. The peoples that nineteenth century European race science would later pronounce incapable of civilisation were among the first to build one, cultivating crops and managing herds while much of Europe was still following reindeer across tundra.