This would mean Neanderthals were more technologically advanced than Sub-Saharan Africans of a mere 2000 years ago.
Madagascar was settled not by Africans, but by people from Borneo/Indonesia. That’s something. ‘Africans’ didn’t arrive until 500+ years later, to that point on ‘discovery’.
Not necessarily.
But Sub-Saharan Africa is not well suited to preserve anything small. Still, there are tantalizing clues that the Okavango delta was once home to huge man made agricultural works sufficient to potentially feed a massive population. Where were the possible cities they fed? Their age is not known but if they are old enough the flooded coastal lands east of Africa around Madagascar, inundated at the end of the Younger Dryas, might be a place to look.
And Africa seems to have suffered less flooding than elsewhere, as there were great swaths of prime real estate in West Europe or Indonesia / South East Asia that disappeared after the last big ice age it’s really difficult to know what once was.
This would mean Neanderthals were more technologically advanced than Sub-Saharan Africans of a mere 2000 years ago.
—
Actually not. Your supposition is wrong historically. The Sub-Saharan were far in advance of the Portuguese who discovered them in the 15th century, and considered the Sub-Saharan civilizations superior to their own (with clean running water and indoor toilets attached to a sewage system - inventions that were missing from Portugal at the time). The Portuguese even petitioned the Crown to be allowed to remain. (A Short History of Africa - Oliver & Fage).
These Sub-Saharan civilizations were likely the degenerated remains of the much older civilization - which the Old Kingdom Egyptians circa 2500 BC called the “Westerners” - and who ruled all of the North African-Mediterranean coast including the Nile Delta. Some of that civilizations remains can still be found Algeria and Libya, but just the odd arch or trilateral stone megalith.
It was after that point of discovery, when the Portuguese began trading with Arab Muslim slavers for slaves in exchange for firearms that the Sub-Saharan civilizations fell apart and their wooden cities returned to jungle ... thus giving rise to the later Western impression that Sub-Saharans were ignorant, stupid savages. That they never rebuilt was due to the loss of so many people to slavery, and to the Muslims who wished only to kill and convert.