Rich and Strange Aeons

Which basic parameters are those? Africa's had agriculture for a good long time, and northwestern Europe got it later than other places, obviously. They skipped the Bronze Age but had iron relatively timely; AFAIK they didn't have literacy but then neither did most of Europe AFAIK, though the Romans may have been pretty literate. Organized societies they did have: kingdoms in the area of Mali in West Africa impressed Arabic and European visitors through the 15th century in scale and peacefulness, before slave trade, ivory trade, and cattle plagues really ruined things.

It's been a few years, but I read Basil Davidson, and R. Oliver's _A Short History of Africa_, and got an eye-opening view of African history, vs. my prior "bunch of tribes in jungle who got enslaved". And this is serious history, not excessively Afrophillic "Egyptians invented electric light bulbs". An intuition that African civilization had less selection on a millennia scale for IQ or co-operation than France or Germany or Scotland, say, seems harder to support after learning more about Africa.