6000 to 5000 BCE · Africanspan
The oldest evidence of cotton spinning in the world comes from Sudan
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The earliest evidence anywhere for the processing of cotton comes from what is now Sudan. It is indirect. No fabric survives from that depth, but the spindle whorls used to spin thread do, and they turn up at sites of the Khartoum culture with calibrated dates in the sixth millennium BCE. Each has the flat round form characteristic of African whorls. That puts Sudanese spinning about a thousand years ahead of the oldest securely dated Indian cotton, and one to two thousand years ahead of the oldest American cotton, from Peru. Ceramics: African first. Iron smelting: African first. Cotton processing: African first. Past a certain point a run of results stops reading as coincidence and starts reading as the technological record of a continent whose peoples were among the most inventive in the ancient world. People at Khartoum were spinning thread eight thousand years ago, in a period the standard curriculum passes over in silence.
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