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9500 BCE

9500 BCE: (Africa’s Independent Invention of Ceramics: The Third-Earliest in World History, Created by People Living in What Is Today Mali, South of the Grea…

African

9500 BCE: (Africa’s Independent Invention of Ceramics: The Third-Earliest in World History, Created by People Living in What Is Today Mali, South of the Great Bend of the Niger River, 12,000 Kilometers from the Yangtze Region, in the Homeland of the Proto-Niger-Congo Language, and Predating Ceramic Technology in the Near East, Europe, and the Americas by Thousands of Years): And then Ehret gets to the point that changes everything. It was Africans who brought into being the third-earliest invention of ceramics in world history. Where did it happen? People living in western Africa, 12,000 kilometers distant from the Yangtze region, independently created this technology. By no later than 11,500 years ago, around 9500 BCE, Africans living in what is today the country of Mali were fashioning pottery. The geographical region of this invention lay in the areas south of the great bend of the Niger River. These lands fell within the areas where the proto-Niger-Congo language would have been spoken, the very homeland of the Niger-Congo language family, the largest language family in Africa today. Let that sit for a moment. The peoples of western Africa invented ceramic technology independently, thousands of years before anyone in the Near East or Europe did the same. This is not a tentative hypothesis buried in a specialist journal. It is a firmly established archaeological finding, dated and located, sitting in the middle of the standard narrative like a fact that refuses to be ignored no matter how many textbooks try. The question is not whether Africans invented ceramics independently. The question is why, knowing this, the standard world history curriculum still acts as if they did not.

Source HT-EHAA-000073