6000–3000 BCE: (The Fourth Age: The Era of Agricultural Exchange, Farming Peoples Spreading Their Methods into New Lands, Agricultural Systems Innovated in D…

6000–3000 BCE: (The Fourth Age: The Era of Agricultural Exchange, Farming Peoples Spreading Their Methods into New Lands, Agricultural Systems Innovated in Distant Regions Coming into Contact and Transforming Each Other, and the Beginnings of a Connected World Built on African as Well as Asian and American Foundations): A new era, partially overlapping with the age of early agriculture, took shape between approximately 6000 and 3000 BCE, a period Ehret designates the era of agricultural exchange. Sometimes even before 6000 BCE, the innovators of these new subsistence systems had begun to spread with their agricultural methods into new lands. As farming peoples expanded, agricultural systems that had been developed independently in distant regions came into contact with one another, generating exchanges of crops, techniques, livestock, and ideas that transformed the economies and societies involved. This was the earliest chapter of a connected world. It was no globalization of the modern era, with its asymmetries of power and extraction. It was an ancient network of mutual influence in which African agricultural systems were contributors to a planetary process. The peoples of the Sahara, the Sahel, the Ethiopian highlands, and the West African forests were participants in this global transformation, their domesticated crops and herding practices radiating outward to reshape the economies of neighboring regions just as Near Eastern and East Asian innovations were reshaping theirs. The conventional narrative of agricultural diffusion from a single Fertile Crescent center into a waiting world is a fabrication that serves the same civilizational hierarchy Ehret’s entire project is designed to dismantle.