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

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