6000–3000 BCE: (The Demand Spiral — Social Stratification Driving Demand for Prestige Metals and Textiles, Growing Availability of Copper and Later Iron Lowe…

6000–3000 BCE: (The Demand Spiral — Social Stratification Driving Demand for Prestige Metals and Textiles, Growing Availability of Copper and Later Iron Lowering Costs and Shifting These Metals into Tools and Weapons While Rarer Metals Like Silver and Gold Became the New Status Markers, the Same Dynamic Applying to Textile Weaving Where Demand from Higher Ranks for Status-Signaling Garments Drove the Technology’s Importance, Cotton Use in the Khartoum Neolithic of Sudan Fitting This Pattern Given the Early Presence of Sacral Chiefs Among Nilo-Saharan Peoples Along the Nile, and the Earliest Cotton Weaving in the Americas Coinciding with the Rise of Social Stratification in Coastal Peru from the Mid-Fourth Millennium BCE): The developments toward social stratification, in bringing about a demand for socially differentiating ornamentation, may have led over time to a greatly increased production of metals. A growing availability, initially in Eurasia, of copper and, by the early first millennium BCE, of iron both in Africa and in Eurasia would have lowered costs and made it possible for people to use these metals increasingly in tools and weapons and, in consequence, to turn to rarer and flashier metals — silver, gold, copper alloys — for ornamentation. The same question applies to textile weaving: the weaving of fabrics may have gained importance, like early metallurgy, because of the demand by higher ranks in emerging stratified societies for garments that signaled and validated their status. This possibility makes good sense for cotton use in the society of the Khartoum Neolithic of Sudan, because indirect evidence suggests the early presence of sacral chiefs among those Nilo-Saharan peoples who lived near major waterways such as the Nile. These implications resonate with the Americas as well: the earliest cotton weaving there belongs close in time to the rise of early political and social stratification in coastal Peru from the mid-fourth millennium BCE onward. The age of agricultural exchange was indeed an age of agricultural expansion and elaboration and of increasing social inequalities, but it was also a time of notable technological advance. Even more strikingly expressive of human technical creativity and inventiveness than the growing use of metals, the overall period from the sixth through the fourth millennia BCE was globally the first age of textiles. The demand spiral — inequality creates demand for prestige goods, prestige goods stimulate technological innovation, innovation increases production, increased production lowers costs, lower costs democratize access, democratization forces elites to seek ever-rarer materials — is a universal dynamic that operated in Africa as early and as consequentially as anywhere else in the world. The sacral chief along the Nile who demanded cotton garments to mark his status was participating in the same dynamic that would later drive the silk trade of China, the linen production of Egypt, and the wool industry of medieval Europe. The first age of textiles was, at its heart, the first age of fashion — the first era in which what you wore told the world who you were.