7000–3000 BCE: (The Balance Sheet of Agricultural Exchange — Africa as Active Contributor, Not Passive Recipient, Sending Far More Outward Than It Received B…

7000–3000 BCE: (The Balance Sheet of Agricultural Exchange — Africa as Active Contributor, Not Passive Recipient, Sending Far More Outward Than It Received Back, at Least Eleven Food Crops Plus the Castor-Oil Plant and the Donkey Spreading from Africa into Eurasia Before and Sometimes Well Before 2000 or 3000 BCE, from Multiple Independent Centers of Innovation Well South in the Continent): In the Age of Agricultural Exchange spanning the seventh to the fourth millennium BCE, Africa was not a passive, recipient continent. Ehret states this with the force of a corrective that should not have been necessary but remains so. Africans were active contributors to new developments in the wider world, sending far more new things outward than they received back. At least eleven different food crops — along with a nonfood crop, the castor-oil plant — in addition to the donkey spread in the opposite direction, from Africa often far into Eurasia before, and possibly sometimes well before, 2000 or 3000 BCE. The sheer inventory demands attention: watermelons and the bottle gourd from the Sudan belt; muskmelons from the Horn of Africa; cowpeas, the country potato, roselle, and the tamarind from West Africa; pearl millet from both the western and eastern parts of the Sudan belt; sorghum and the lablab bean from the eastern Sahara and eastern Sudan; finger millet from Cushitic-speaking peoples in the Ethiopian highlands; the castor-oil plant most probably from the Horn of Africa, also from Cushitic speakers; and the donkey from Cushitic-speaking inhabitants of the dry steppe and semidesert lands of the far eastern Sahara and the northern fringe of the Ethiopian Highlands. Thirteen contributions from multiple independent centers of innovation, none of them along the Mediterranean fringe, all of them deep in the African interior. The ledger is not close. Africa gave far more to the ancient connected world than it received, and the fact that this sentence still reads as a provocation rather than a commonplace tells you everything about the state of the discipline.