Before 5000 BCE: (The Donkey — Africa’s Gift of the First Multi-Purpose Beast of Burden in World History, an Animal Domesticated for Carrying Loads, for Ridi…

Before 5000 BCE: (The Donkey — Africa’s Gift of the First Multi-Purpose Beast of Burden in World History, an Animal Domesticated for Carrying Loads, for Riding, and in the Middle East Put Early to Use Pulling Wheeled Vehicles, Essential to the Earliest Long-Distance Trade and the First Wheeled Transport, the Model for the Subsequent Domestication and Utilization of Horses and Camels, and the Contempt of Modern Western Culture Completely Missing the Immense Historical Significance of This Animal): Not only plants but also one particularly notable animal came to the rest of the world from Africa: the donkey. Modern cultural attitudes make it easy to underestimate the historical significance of donkey domestication. Centuries of Western contempt for the animal they call the lowly ass — using its very name as an insult for stupidity — have obscured an immense truth. The donkey was the first multi-purpose beast of burden in world history. It carried loads. It carried riders. In the Middle East, it was very early put to use pulling wheeled vehicles. The possession of donkeys was essential to the earliest carrying of goods over long distances for trade and to the emergence of the first wheeled transport in history. And — in what should be one of the most cited facts in any world history textbook — the uses that people made of the donkey very likely served as the models for the subsequent domestication and utilization of horses and camels. Every horse-drawn chariot in Egypt, every camel caravan across Arabia, every cavalry charge in ancient warfare traces its conceptual ancestry to a humble animal that Africans domesticated thousands of years before any horse bore a rider. The contempt is itself a historical artifact, the residue of a civilization that could not bear to acknowledge that its most transformative technologies of transport and warfare owed their origins to African innovation.