5000–3000 BCE: (Interregional Connections Within Africa — The Varied Origin Lands of These Thirteen Contributions Revealing That by or Before 5000 to 3000 BC…

5000–3000 BCE: (Interregional Connections Within Africa — The Varied Origin Lands of These Thirteen Contributions Revealing That by or Before 5000 to 3000 BCE Interregional Connections Were Increasingly Shaping Cultural and Economic Exchange Within the Continent, West African Crops Spreading Eastward Across the Sudan Belt and Becoming Part of the Outward Flow to Eurasia, While Domestic Animals Spread Westward in a Countervailing Movement): What the varied origin lands of these African contributions tell us is that, already by or before 5000 to 3000 BCE, interregional connections began more and more to shape the wider trends of cultural and economic exchange within the continent. The spread of crops of West African origin eastward across the Sudan belt — and in the most easterly areas becoming part of the outward flow of agricultural innovations from Africa into Eurasia — marks a particularly notable feature of this emerging historical age. But equally notable was the countervailing, westward spread across the continent of several kinds of domestic animals during that same span. Reconstructed word histories from Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afrasian languages reveal that goats and cattle had spread from the eastern Sudan regions far across West Africa as early as the fifth and fourth millennia BCE. And the donkey, domesticated far to the east by Africans of the Red Sea Hills and northern fringe of the Ethiopian Highlands, may have been introduced to the western and central Sudan regions equally early. What emerges is a picture of the continent as a vast engine of exchange, with crops moving east and animals moving west, each flow enriching the economies and transforming the societies it reached. This is not the image of a continent waiting for outside stimulus. This is a continent whose internal networks of connection were generating their own dynamism, their own momentum, their own historical trajectory — and doing so millennia before anyone in Europe had heard of Africa at all.