6000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
Villages grow denser as exchanged crops raise the yield
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Every crop and every animal that crossed from one farming system into another widened what a community could eat and lowered the chance that one bad season would empty the granary. Across these millennia the share of food coming from fields and herds climbed and the share taken by hunting and gathering fell away, and the change arrived by accumulation rather than by any single break. More food meant more people. It also meant people living closer together, in settlements that grew in area as well as in number, and by the end of the period a few regions had assembled political formations larger and more centralised than anything before them. Towns, kingdoms, trade routes, specialised crafts and organised religion all rest on that base. In Africa the base was laid in the same span of centuries as in Eurasia. The social complexity that European observers later declared missing from Africa was under construction while Europe was still farming at its crudest.
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