Africans south of the Sahara invented iron smelting themselves

By 1000 to 700 BCE, before the Phoenicians settled Carthage, ironworking was established across the African savannas from east to west, more than fifteen hundred kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast. The westernmost sites lie in the country of the Nok culture in north central Nigeria and date to the eighth or ninth century BCE. Sites of similar age have been found in the southwestern Chad basin nearby. In Rwanda, thousands of kilometres east of Nok, smelting furnaces excavated by Marie-Claude Van Grunderbeek and her team date from as early as the middle of the eighth century BCE. Look at what that means on a map. Furnaces separated by thousands of kilometres of savanna were running at the same time as, or earlier than, the supposed points of entry along the northern edge of the continent, and no route carries the technique from Anatolia to Nigeria or Rwanda before it reaches Carthage. Africans in the savannas worked iron out for themselves, and it changed farming, war and government there for the next two thousand years.

Late in the Archaic Age the traffic grew heavier between the islands and the Isthmo-Colombian mainland of Central and South America. Goods moved, and so did people and ideas. Keegan and Hofman describe these routes as lifelines running back to the communities the islanders had come from, which is a precise way to put it. A small population scattered across islands needs contact to stay viable, socially and culturally and in the plainest biological sense, and the mainland connection supplied it. The archaeology of the period looks different from one island to the next, and the authors read that variation as people adjusting to the particular place they had landed in. What this era built was the framework the later ceramic age villages would use. The settled farming communities that eventually filled Hispaniola did not appear out of nowhere. They inherited routes, relationships and habits of movement that had been in service for centuries.

The spread of the early iron smelting sites carries two implications. The first concerns place. The pattern of the distribution makes it likely that the people who worked out the technology lived somewhere in the fifteen hundred kilometres of woodland savanna between central Nigeria and the far northwestern fringe of East Africa. The second concerns time. Sites were already scattered across that enormous stretch three thousand years ago, and a technology takes generations to travel that far, so the founding workshops should date centuries before 1000 BCE. Both expectations have since been tested. In the last two decades archaeologists have found earlier African ironworking than anything previously recorded, and the finds sit inside the predicted zone. Ôboui, in the western Central African Republic, is one of them. This is the pattern that keeps repeating in Ehret's field. A prediction is made from vocabulary and distribution, someone digs in the indicated place, and the dates come back older than the standard account allows.

Around 700 BCE the knowledge of iron smelting began moving out from the early Great Lakes Bantu to the rest of the early Mashariki, the eastern branch of Bantu speakers. The Great Lakes region is where Schmidt and Avery documented prehistoric smelting of an advanced kind, and it acted here as the transmission node, the place from which furnace technique travelled on to communities spread across a wide stretch of eastern Africa. Ehret dates that stage from the linguistic and archaeological record together. He first set the finding out in a lecture at Columbia University in September 1974, added evidence from South Sudan when the Society of Africanist Archaeologists met at UCLA in March 1992, and published it later still. Nearly two decades separate the finding from the article. I keep the delay in view because it says something about the discipline. The resistance to African technical achievement that Schmidt later wrote about was already in the rooms where these papers were read.