A string of towns in Mauritania specialised, one product to a town

The best studied centre of early West African production lies in the Tichit region of southern Mauritania, near the Malian border and five hundred kilometres west northwest of the inland delta of the Niger. Between 1800 and 1200 BCE a line of towns grew up there, one of them noticeably larger and near the middle of the cluster. Families of skilled craftsmen in each town made goods for sale, and the towns divided the work between them. One turned out arrowheads. Another made grindstones. A third produced beads of carnelian. Their trade reached hundreds of kilometres east and west, far past the neighbours. These were towns with differentiated craft economies and interregional commerce, operating at a moment when the Phoenicians were only beginning to establish themselves in the Mediterranean. The stone ruins are still standing in the Mauritanian desert. Whatever a textbook says about when African urban life began, the foundations are lying there in the sand to be measured.

Around 1500 BCE a distinct ceramic tradition, which archaeologists call the Barrancoid series, developed in the middle and lower stretches of the Orinoco valley in what is now Venezuela. Over time its makers moved downriver toward the coast. The people already holding that ground, the communities Rouse files under the Saladero heading, were pushed out of their positions along the river, and out of that disturbance came the subseries he named Cedrosan Saladoid. This is upstream bookkeeping that matters a great deal for Haiti. The Cedrosan Saladoid are the people who a thousand years later carried farming, pottery and village life out of South America and into the Antilles, island by island, until they reached Hispaniola. The population Columbus met in 1492 descended from them. So the chain that ends in the Taino villages of the north coast begins with a pottery style shifting position on a South American river three thousand years earlier.

Two sites carry the earliest known evidence of iron smelting on earth. One is Ôboui, in the west of the Central African Republic. The second, Gbatoro, lies about a hundred kilometres away over the border in Cameroon. Radiocarbon puts both at 1800 BCE or earlier. The excavation reports describe careful work on undisturbed ground, with clean layers sealing the deposits above and below. At Ôboui the whole sequence of the craft is present in one workshop: furnace structures, the clay tuyeres that fed air to the fire, pieces of worked iron, slag, stone anvils for hammering, and charcoal in quantity for dating. Four thousand years ago, in the middle of Africa, people were smelting and forging iron. These are not stray dates from a thin dig. They are two sites, both inside the zone the linguistic evidence had already predicted, both fully excavated and both dated. African iron is older than Anatolian iron by at least three centuries.

Metallurgy is usually taught as a ladder. People start with copper, which melts at a low temperature and sometimes shows up as visible metal in rock, and only later work out that fiercer heat will pull iron out of ore. Across large parts of Africa the ladder has its rungs in a different order. In the earliest ironworking areas, in the Central African Republic and across most of the continent below the Sahara, iron was known and used before copper was. Prior copper smelting cannot be the explanation for the African discovery, because there was no prior copper smelting. Something else supplied the knowledge, and the likeliest candidate is ceramics. Women had been firing clay in high heat for thousands of years by then, and the control of temperature and airflow that pottery demands is most of what a smelting furnace needs. The African road to iron went through the kiln. The Bronze Age that world history courses treat as a universal stage never happened here.