5000–3000 BCE: (The Global Map of Independent Weaving Inventions — Cotton Weaving in Sudan by or Before 5000 BCE as the Earliest, Independently in India Arou…

5000–3000 BCE: (The Global Map of Independent Weaving Inventions — Cotton Weaving in Sudan by or Before 5000 BCE as the Earliest, Independently in India Around a Millennium Later, Independently in South and Middle America Only Slightly After That, Silk Weaving in China by the Fourth Millennium, Linen Weaving in the Middle East and Egypt Probably Equally Early, and a Second African Invention of Loom Technology in West Africa No Later Than the Fourth Millennium for the Weaving of Raffia Cloth, Transformative Technologies Created Not by People in States but by People in Regions Without Cities or States): Most notable was the weaving of cotton in Sudan by or before 5000 BCE; independently in India around a millennium later; and in South and Middle America only slightly later than that, and also quite independently. These were not the only independent developments of weaving technology in this age. The invention of silk weaving in China dates as early as the fourth millennium. People in the Middle East and Egypt probably equally early were weaving linen from the fibers of domesticated flax plants. In addition, Africans living in West Africa, far from the eastern Sudan regions, independently brought a second African invention of loom technology into being no later than the fourth millennium BCE, applying this technology to the weaving of raffia cloth. In many if not most cases it was not people who lived in states or highly stratified societies who created these various transformative technological developments. The earliest known smelting of copper from ores took place in the later sixth millennium among people living not in Mesopotamia or the Levant or along the Nile, but in the Balkans. And in Africa the inventors of both cotton and raffia textile weaving lived in regions as yet without cities or states. The global map of weaving inventions mirrors the global map of agricultural inventions: multiple independent centers, multiple continents, Africa among the earliest. Cotton weaving in Sudan before 5000 BCE — a full millennium before India, the civilization that the Western tradition credits with the invention of cotton textiles. Raffia weaving in West Africa by the fourth millennium — a second, entirely independent African invention of loom technology, using a different fiber, a different technique, and a different cultural context. And the people who made these inventions were not the elites of urban civilizations. They were village-dwelling farmers and herders, people whose technological creativity the standard narrative has no framework to acknowledge because the standard narrative assumes that transformative innovation requires the stimulus of state-level society. It does not. It requires ingenuity, and ingenuity is universally distributed.