17,000 BCE onward: (Demographic Expansion Not Limited to the Holocene — The Spread of Early Afrasian-Speaking People with a Wild-Grain-Collecting Economy Out…

17,000 BCE onward: (Demographic Expansion Not Limited to the Holocene — The Spread of Early Afrasian-Speaking People with a Wild-Grain-Collecting Economy Outward from the Horn of Africa to Egypt and Beyond Belonging Entirely to the Immediate Pre-Holocene Age from the Seventeenth Millennium BCE Onward, Wide Population and Cultural Extensions in World History Not Something That Came into Effect Only with the Adoption of Agriculture, Shifts from One Set of Foraging Strategies to Another Also Offering Productive Advantages That Initiate Population Expansions): This kind of demographic history has not been limited to the Holocene. The example considered in Chapter 5 — of the spread of early Afrasian-speaking people with a wild-grain-collecting economy outward from the Horn of Africa to Egypt and beyond — belongs entirely to the immediate pre-Holocene age, from the seventeenth millennium BCE onward. Wide population and cultural extensions in world history were not something that came into effect only with the adoption of agricultural practices. These examples — with Africa providing notable case studies — tell us that shifts not only from foraging to food production, but also from one set of foraging strategies to another, can offer productive advantages that initiate population expansions into new lands. The implication is quietly revolutionary. The conventional narrative treats the Neolithic revolution as the engine that set human demographic history in motion — the moment when population growth and territorial expansion began in earnest. But the Afrasian expansion proves otherwise. Grain collectors, not grain farmers, spread from the Horn of Africa to the Nile Valley and beyond, carrying their language and their culture thousands of kilometers, millennia before anyone planted a seed. The demographic engine was not agriculture per se. It was subsistence intensification — any innovation that allowed a population to extract more food from a given environment. Agriculture was the most powerful such innovation, but it was not the only one, and Africa provides the clearest evidence that the process of population expansion driven by subsistence advantage predates the Holocene by thousands of years.