1000 to 700 BCE · Africanspan
Africans south of the Sahara invented iron smelting themselves
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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.
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