3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan
Farmers reach the rainforest and the northern woods as kingdoms appear
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In the three thousand years before 300 CE the scale of political organisation changed. Populations were denser, kingdoms formed, and in several regions kingdoms grew into empires. Farmers meanwhile reworked their crops and their methods to live in country that had been marginal for agriculture: the northern temperate belts of Europe and North America, the rainforests of Africa and South America, and Pacific islands that had never held people at all. The parallel is worth holding onto. African farmers were adapting to the equatorial forest in the same centuries that European farmers were adapting to cold northern soils. From the early second millennium BCE, new techniques of manufacture and a wider range of goods made regular long-distance trade worth the trouble, and by the first millennium BCE those networks were carrying social, political and commercial consequences across Africa and Eurasia together. Africa generated its own commercial networks and traded on them as a full partner.
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