3000 BCE–300 CE: (Global History Period Five — The Last Three Millennia BCE and First Several Centuries CE, an Age in Which Agricultural Ways of Life Spread …

3000 BCE–300 CE: (Global History Period Five — The Last Three Millennia BCE and First Several Centuries CE, an Age in Which Agricultural Ways of Life Spread to Nearly All Remaining Areas of the Earth Suitable for Farming, Bringing with Them the Social Cultural and Demographic Consequences That This Kind of Subsistence Transformation Supported, the Bantu Expansion Across the Southern Third of Africa Being the Best-Known Example): As for the history of the last three millennia BCE and first several centuries CE, a number of major themes with wide global or regional impact stand out. Notably, it was in this age that agricultural ways of life spread to nearly all of the remaining areas of the earth suitable for farming, and these developments brought along with them the kinds of social, cultural, and demographic consequences that this type of transformation of subsistence supported. The long and complex histories of the spread, between 3000 BCE and 300 CE, of the speakers of languages of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Congo family across most of the southern third of Africa constitute the example best known to historians and most likely to receive significant coverage in a book of world history. The Bantu expansion is one of the great demographic events in human history — a population movement that, over three millennia, carried a single language family from a homeland in the Cameroon-Nigeria borderlands across the equatorial rainforest and out onto the savannas of eastern and southern Africa, eventually encompassing a third of the continent. It is the African parallel to the Austronesian expansion across the Pacific, the Indo-European expansion across Eurasia, the Turkic expansion across Central Asia. And like those parallels, it was driven by the same fundamental engine: food production enabling population growth, population growth enabling territorial expansion, territorial expansion carrying languages, cultures, and technologies into new environments.