Five Thousand Years Ago, Africa Had A Major Civilization We Forgot

[Judi Lynn]

Its influence on better-known ancient civilizations is unknown, but may well have been an important missing piece in our understanding.

Stephen Luntz
Freelance Writer

Edited
by
Holly Large



The ancient city of Oued Beht was once one of the great cities of the Mediterranean region.

Image credit: Toby Wilkinson

Evidence has been revealed of a city existing 5,400-4,900 years ago in what is now Morocco, that its discoverers claim was the era’s largest in Africa outside of the Nile Basin. There are signs the region had extensive trading links with settlements across the Strait of Gibraltar in Iberia, and its influence may well have stretched much further afield around the Mediterranean.

Morocco houses what some consider the oldest fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, as well as the oldest shell beads and a shift in stone technology. The Maghreb, the region that combines Morocco with areas east as far as Libya, was home to Carthage, the power that most threatened the Roman Republic.

However, between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, there is a vast hole in our knowledge of the area. Perched as the Maghreb is between the Sahara Desert and the ocean, it’s possible to wave this away by imagining the coastal strip becoming temporarily too arid to support many people. However, Professor Cyprian Broodbank of Cambridge University has been resisting this idea for a long time.

"For over thirty years I have been convinced that Mediterranean archaeology has been missing something fundamental in later prehistoric north Africa,” Broodbank said in a statement. “Now, at last, we know that was right, and we can begin to think in new ways that acknowledge the dynamic contribution of Africans to the emergence and interactions of early Mediterranean societies.”

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/five-thousand-years-ago-africa-had-a-major-civilization-we-forgot-76094

[msongs]

1. north africa seems to have been much wetter thousands of years ago nt

[Judi Lynn]

2. Previously unknown Neolithic society in Morocco discovered: North Africa's role in Mediterranean prehistory

September 23, 2024
by University of Cambridge

Archaeological fieldwork in Morocco has discovered the earliest previously unknown farming society from a poorly understood period of northwest African prehistory.


This study, published today in Antiquity, reveals for the first time the importance of the Maghreb (northwest Africa) in the emergence of complex societies in the wider Mediterranean.

With a Mediterranean environment, a border with the Sahara desert and the shortest maritime crossing between Africa and Europe, the Maghreb is perfectly located as a hub for major cultural developments and intercontinental connections in the past.

While the region's importance during the Paleolithic, Iron Age and Islamic periods is well known, there is a significant gap in knowledge of the archaeology of the Maghreb between c. 4000 and 1000 BC, a period of dynamic change across much of the Mediterranean.

To tackle this, Youssef Bokbot (INSAP), Cyprian Broodbank (Cambridge University), and Giulio Lucarini (CNR-ISPC and ISMEO) have carried out collaborative, multidisciplinary archaeological fieldwork at Oued Beht, Morocco.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2024-09-previously-unknown-neolithic-society-morocco.html

[Lunabell]

3. There were many great societies in Africa that are "forgotten" about in world history.

It's almost as if they are a deliberate ommision.

Another needed.

[brush]

4. Thanks for this. There were also civilizations in sub-Shaharan Africa like...

Timbuktu and it's library of precious manuscripts and documents where scholars went to study.

There is much unknown as climate changed over the millennia, and who knows what else is buried under the sands and deep in the bush of the continent where humanity evolved and some migrated from.