1.3 Africa: 5000 to 3000 b.c.

Northeast africa

Back to Africa: 8000 to 5000 B.C.

In this period there were Cushitic speaking Hamitic people along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden on the coastline of the horn of Africa. In Egypt, sometime between 4,500 and 3,100 B.C. the Badarian Culture existed, with agriculture, irrigation, clearing of jungles and swamps and pictographic writing, which may have been imported from Sumeria. These Badarians may have come from south of Egypt via the Red Sea and Wadi Hammarat, but it is possible that immigrants from Jericho also arrived, bringing food-producing techniques. The overall population of the lower Nile was probably less than 20,000 at 5,000 B.C. (Ref. 83 ) The climate was cold and damp and the people wore kilts or long skirts made of linen or skins with the fur inward. They lived in some type of tents or perishable wall homes.

Hippopotami and crocodiles were in evidence, and in the area of el Badari there are bodies of dogs, sheep and oxen wrapped in matting or linen. This suggests possible reverence for these animals. Lower Egypt had domestic grazing animals from the Levant by about 4,500 B.C., but the Badarians lived primarily in middle Egypt and their pottery dates to the second half of the 5th millennium by thermoluminescence. That they had outside contacts is evidenced by ivory spoons, shells from the Red Sea and turquoise beads from the Sinai. Recent finds of a vast number of reed ships, many with masts and sails have been made in the long dried-up wadi between the Nile and the Red Sea which may well date back to this period. The Egyptians are basically Hamitic, but may well have added mixtures of Nubian, Ethiopian and Libyan natives, coming from the Sahara as it slowly dried, along with immigrant Semitic or Armenoid tribes. Cattle were used as beasts of burden perhaps by 4,000 B.C. The sail was used from about 3,500 B.C. on, and pottery dating to 3,100 bears paintings of sickle-shaped sailing vessels, apparently built with reeds and complete with cabins and centerboards. Egypt was first united as the "Old Kingdom" under Menes

North central and northwest africa

A Neolithic Hamitic culture was present in Algeria and Morocco with agricultural settlements and pottery by 5,000 B.C. The Sahara was quite wet from 7,000 to 2,000 B.C. and the many lakes reached their maximum extent about 3,500 B.C. when Lake Chad covered some 200,000 square miles. It is now the only remaining lake with 15,000 square miles of water. The rivers of the Sahara ran inland so that alluvial material gradually filled up the inland basins, blocking and slowing the streams. In the fierce sun that followed the changing climate, the water evaporated and the marshes dried out. Salt deposits are still worked at such places as Amadror, Teghaza and Taoudenni which are simply old inland basins. The people of the wet Sahara were Negroid and they raised domesticated cattle and left beautiful works of art on rocks with some figures as high as twenty-six feet. Elephants, antelope, water animals and fish were abundant. The Negroid people of this era were not the Bushmanoid, round-headed people pictured on the rock drawings before 6,000 B.C. (Ref. 8 , 176 )

Subsaharan africa

At 4,000 B.C. there were two languages of the western Sudan family - Yoruba and Idoma - but they were already very different and had apparently been diverging for several thousand years. (Ref. 83 ) In tropical Africa there were probably scattered bands of peoples whose descendants are the pygmies of the Zaire forests and Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. The first true Negroes probably lived as fishermen along the Nile and the Niger rivers and the savannah north and west of the forest about 4,000 B.C. (Ref. 175 , 83 )

Forward to Africa: 3000 to 1500 B.C.