10,000–5500 BCE: (Global Parallels — Agricultural Invention Driving Language Family Expansion Not Only in Africa but Worldwide, the Originators of the Indepe…

10,000–5500 BCE: (Global Parallels — Agricultural Invention Driving Language Family Expansion Not Only in Africa but Worldwide, the Originators of the Independent Interior New Guinea Invention of Agriculture in the Eighth and Seventh Millennia Probably Speaking Proto-Trans-New Guinea and from Around 7000 BCE Spreading That Language Family Across the Island, North Caucasian Family Speakers Playing Major Roles in the Creation of Agriculture in the Northern Fertile Crescent and Likely Carrying the First Agriculture Westward Across Southern Europe in the Seventh and Sixth Millennia, the Pattern Being Universal: Food Production Drove Population Growth Which Drove Linguistic Expansion): Parallel trends of history played out elsewhere in the world in these eras. The originators of the independent interior New Guinea invention of agriculture in around the eighth and seventh millennia most probably spoke, as Andrew Pawley has argued, the proto-Trans-New Guinea language. From around 7000 BCE onward their cultural heirs spread out, introducing the new subsistence system along with Trans-New Guinea languages across large parts of the island and to neighboring island chains. Similarly, recent scholarship gives good reason to suppose that it was peoples speaking languages related to the North Caucasian family who, in the tenth and ninth millennia BCE, played major roles in the creation of agricultural ways of life around the northern and northwestern parts of the Fertile Crescent. In addition, it was likely people of that background who carried the first agriculture westward across southern Europe and into interior and farther western Europe over the course of the seventh and early sixth millennia BCE. The pattern is universal: wherever agriculture was invented, it drove population growth; population growth drove territorial expansion; territorial expansion drove the spread of the inventors’ language family across vast new territories. This is not an African peculiarity. It is a global regularity, and Africa participates in it fully — not as a recipient of innovations developed elsewhere, but as one of the primary theaters in which this universal dynamic played out, with three independent agricultural traditions generating three independent language family expansions that together reshaped the demographic and linguistic map of the continent.