8500 to 8000 BCE · Africanspan
Africa invented pottery a second time, three thousand kilometres east of Mali
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The fourth invention of ceramic technology also happened in Africa. During the ninth and eighth millennia BCE, people living three thousand kilometres east of Mali, in the southern half of the eastern Sahara, began making pots of their own. On present evidence this owes nothing to the West African centre. It appears everywhere in country whose inhabitants have spoken Nilo-Saharan languages for thousands of years, and its decorative motifs are arranged differently from those on the older western wares. The spread runs east to west, into the lands between modern Sudan and Mali, which is the wrong direction for a West African origin. So Africans invented a foundational technology twice, independently, in two separate language communities. The Malian potters were working at least three millennia before anyone in the Middle East, and four millennia before the technique started moving from the Middle East into eastern Europe. Both African inventions predate the civilisations most curricula still treat as the beginning of everything.
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