The queens of Meroe ruled in their own right for eight centuries

From the fifth century BCE to the third century CE the empire of Meroe was ruled by queens. The Kandake held primary authority in their own names, over a multiethnic population that mostly traced descent through mothers. The pattern runs deeper than that. Comparative evidence across the Bantu-speaking third of the continent indicates that senior women already held recognised authority in the governance of their communities during the early Bantu expansions of the third to first millennia BCE. Earlier again, women drove two of the largest material changes in African history, the invention of ceramics and the spread of farming across much of the continent. The pattern also runs later. In seventeenth century Angola the state of Matamba, whose people also reckoned descent through the mother, was headed by a queen, the muhongo, while her male consort ran the army. Ruling women in Africa came out of a working kinship system, and the patriarchal habits of Western scholarship have made that system hard to see.

Jolly Beach sits on the west coast of Antigua, looking out over reefs and a productive stretch of shallow sea. Around 2000 BCE the people there were making sophisticated flint blades, which sets the site apart from the general run of early stone working in the islands. Their diet was wide. They took eight major species of mollusc, fish from shallow water, sea turtles and manatees. They also took far more land animals than the other coastal sites on Antigua from the same period, and that is the second thing marking Jolly Beach out. Better stone technology and a broader food base together suggest a place people used for longer stretches, or for more purposes, than the camps around it. Two settlements on one small island, a short walk apart, could run on different economies. Archaic populations in the Caribbean read the ground in front of them and adapted site by site.

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.