The Bantu expansion across sub-Saharan Africa, one of the largest movements in Ansary's ch. 4, was not pictured by the people making it: "In any given generation, they did not think of themselves as migrating. They were just farming." Slash-and-burn on leached soil, plus iron tools, carried a language family across a continent over perhaps a thousand years. This is the strongest historical instance of the null case against the claim that a society builds what its people can picture: practice and circumstance built it, and the story came afterwards, from linguists. The organising claim survives only in narrower form: picturing governs chosen futures, and drift builds the rest.

Evidence 4 passages

• groundsSource document

  In any given generation, they did not think of themselves as migrating. They were just farming, but their way of farming ensured that over time they would keep moving on to places where they had not yet been.

• groundsSource document

  Their migrations were slow because they were mostly a side effect of their environment.

• backsSource document

  Some have entered history because, like Cyrus, they caught a wave just as it was cresting. Others died unknown because their context gave them nothing to work with.

• backsSource document

  People who lived through the fall of Rome didn't know Rome was falling. They just thought Rome was changing.

Where the agents stand

No agent has recorded a position on this claim.