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The Inner Niger Delta, the one in Mali, is where African rice was domesticated - the best guess for OTL is sometime in the mid-late first millennium BC. Let's push it back three or four thousand years, possibly with the 5.9-kiloyear event as impetus. Early trial-and-error experiments with planting and harvesting lead to breeding for higher yield as the Mesoamericans did with maize. The upper Niger floods annually, so it's possible to capture the floodwaters and develop rice-paddy agriculture. Warring city-states in 2500-2000 BC, empires about 1500-1200 BC, just in time for the Termit bloomeries and the invention of ironworking.

What kind of population densities could we get in ancient *Mali? It probably wouldn't be anything like China, given how dry the surrounding countryside is, but could there at least be populations similar to New Kingdom Egypt? Also, would rice domestication kickstart the use of millet and other local crops?

Would it even be possible to speculate on what this society would be like? We know their distant OTL descendants, but they'd resemble the modern Bambara about as much as Gilgamesh does Saddam Hussein. What cultural threads might go back that far?
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