50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (The Chapter 3 Summation — Developments in Ancient Africa Moving Along Similar Historical Vectors and During the Same Broad Ages as Among…

50,000+ BCE–300 CE: (The Chapter 3 Summation — Developments in Ancient Africa Moving Along Similar Historical Vectors and During the Same Broad Ages as Among Peoples of Other Continents, the Impossibility of Understanding the Emergence of Towns and Complex Society in India Without Accounting for African Agricultural Contributions, and the Donkey’s Seminal Impact on the Global History of Animal Transport and Wheeled Transport): Ehret closes Chapter 3 by returning to the themes that frame his entire project in Ancient Africa: A Global History. Developments in ancient historical periods of world history moved ahead in Africa along similar historical vectors and did so during the same broad ages as among the peoples of other continents — in technology, in agricultural history, and, as chapters 4 and 5 will show, in the emergence of commerce, towns, and states. He offers a specific and devastating example: one cannot fully understand the emergence of towns and complex society in India if we do not take into account the fundamental African contributions to the evolution of agricultural ways of life in the subcontinent. The crops that fed the growing populations of the Indus Valley and beyond included African domesticates whose presence in South Asia is not incidental but foundational. And Africans were the domesticators of the donkey, an animal that became a major stimulus for change outside the continent, with a fundamental impact on early trade history across large parts of ancient Eurasia as well as westward across the Sudan belt of Africa. Donkey domestication had a seminal impact on the global history of animal transport and wheeled transport, serving as the model for camel domestication and, possibly, for the use of horses for riding and for wheeled-vehicle transport. This is the final word of a chapter that has systematically demolished the myth of African passivity in the ancient world. The continent that gave humanity its existence also gave it the crops that fed its cities, the animal that carried its goods, and the model for every subsequent revolution in overland transport.