10,000 to 5500 BCE · Africanspan
New Guinea and the Caucasus repeat the pattern that Africa set
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The link between inventing agriculture and spreading a language family holds well outside Africa. Andrew Pawley argues that the people who worked out cultivation in interior New Guinea in the eighth and seventh millennia BCE spoke proto-Trans-New Guinea, and that from around 7000 BCE their descendants carried both the crops and the language across much of the island and into neighbouring island chains. Recent work points the same way for the northern and northwestern edges of the Fertile Crescent, where speakers of languages related to the North Caucasian family had a major hand in creating farming in the tenth and ninth millennia BCE. People of that background probably also carried the first agriculture west across southern Europe and on into the interior and the far west over the seventh and early sixth millennia. The pattern is a global regularity. Africa's three independent agricultural traditions and their three language family expansions are the continent taking a full part in it.
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