5000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
Cotton was woven in Sudan a thousand years before India
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Cotton was being woven in Sudan by 5000 BCE. India arrived at cotton weaving about a millennium later and did so on its own, and people in South and Middle America worked it out shortly after that, also on their own. Silk weaving in China dates to the fourth millennium BCE. Linen from domesticated flax was probably being woven in the Middle East and Egypt equally early. Far from the eastern Sudan, in West Africa, people invented loom technology a second time and applied it to raffia no later than the fourth millennium. The map of weaving looks like the map of agriculture: several centres, several continents, Africa among the first. The inventors were mostly villagers. Cotton weaving and raffia weaving both happened in country that had neither cities nor states, and the earliest known copper smelting from ore, in the later sixth millennium BCE, happened in the Balkans. Transformative technique does not require a state to produce it.
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