5000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
Crops moved east and herds moved west across Africa's own networks
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The origins of Africa's thirteen exports are scattered across the continent, and the scatter is itself the finding. By 5000 to 3000 BCE Africa was already crossed by regional connections that shaped what people grew and what they traded. Crops first domesticated in West Africa moved east along the Sudan belt, and in the easternmost stretch they joined the outward flow into Eurasia. Traffic ran the other way at the same time. Word histories reconstructed from Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Afrasian languages show goats and cattle spreading from the eastern Sudan far across West Africa in the fifth and fourth millennia BCE, and the donkey, domesticated in the far northeast, may have arrived in the western and central Sudan just as early. Crops going one way, animals going the other, each transfer altering the economy that took it in. This is a continent generating its own momentum thousands of years before anyone in Europe had heard of it.
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