The African Origins of History

Barely more than fifty thousand years ago, the ancestors of every single human being alive today lived in Africa. World history to that point was African history. That is now becoming accepted knowledge. Less generally understood is that, just because a few Africans left the continent around fifty thousand years ago and began to expand across the rest of the globe, history did not come to a halt in Africa. The Africans who stayed behind in our ancestral continent did not fall out of time into some kind of ahistorical stasis. They passed through the same great transitions of human history – from foraging to agricultural ways of life; from small-scale, local communities to societies of towns and states; and from localized, irregular exchanges of surplus to complex systems of formal, long-distance commerce – and they passed through those transitions in the same broad periods of time as did people elsewhere in the world.

The First Great Transition

For thirty-five thousand years, human beings, wherever they spread in the world, continued to be gatherers and hunters of wild food. Then, separately in different parts of the world, the climatic shifts at the end of the latest ice age set off a long, episodic “First Great Transition” of human history, from foraging to food production – from the gathering and hunting of wild food to the deliberate tending and protection of animals and plants.