6000–5000 BCE: (The Westward Spread of Nilo-Saharan Agropastoralism Across the Sahel — In the Sixth Millennium Descendant Nilo-Saharan Communities Spreading …

6000–5000 BCE: (The Westward Spread of Nilo-Saharan Agropastoralism Across the Sahel — In the Sixth Millennium Descendant Nilo-Saharan Communities Spreading with Their New Economy of Cattle Herding and Grain Cultivation Across the Sahel and Southern Sahara as Far West as the Hoggar Range and the Great Bend of the Niger River, While the Aquatic Way of Life Persisted in Areas Where Waterways Remained, the Pastoralist Expansion Representing One of the Great Demographic Transformations of African Prehistory): In the sixth millennium their descendant communities were able to spread with this new economy across the Sahel and the southern Sahara as far west as the Hoggar Range and the great bend of the Niger River. The Aquatic way of life long remained viable in the areas where waterways persisted, but the overall trajectory was clear: the future belonged to the agropastoralists. The westward expansion of Nilo-Saharan cattle herders and grain cultivators across the Sahel in the sixth millennium BCE was one of the great demographic transformations of African prehistory. Within a single millennium, communities carrying an integrated economy of cattle herding and sorghum cultivation spread from the eastern Sahara to the Niger bend — a distance of over three thousand kilometers. They carried with them not only their economic practices but their languages, their social structures, their matrilineal kinship systems, and the ceramic traditions that would eventually flow southward into the Middle Nile Culture Area and contribute to the cultural foundations of ancient Egypt. The Sahel belt — that vast east-west corridor of semi-arid grassland stretching across the full width of Africa — became, in the sixth millennium, a Nilo-Saharan cultural highway, and the communities that traveled it were building the economic and demographic base from which some of Africa’s most consequential civilizations would eventually emerge.