4000 to 1000 BCE · Africanspan
A second copper industry was invented in the mountains of Niger
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In the far north of Africa metallurgy followed the sequence textbooks expect. Copper arrived in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE, as native metal from deposits in Sinai, first for ornament and then in earnest as Egypt entered the Bronze Age early in the third millennium. Slightly later, and two thousand five hundred kilometres away in the Aïr mountains of present day Niger, another people started again from nothing. They most likely spoke a Nilo-Saharan language of the western Sahelian group. The archaeologist Augustin Holl reads the earliest Aïr copper sites, running from 2500 to 1500 BCE, as a long period of experiment with furnace designs, settling by 1500 BCE into a mature and standard technology. Copper then went into trade. Work by the historian Constanze Weise on borrowed vocabulary puts Aïr copper in northwestern Nigeria before 1000 BCE, and by the ninth century BCE the smelting technique itself had travelled a thousand kilometres further west into southern Mauritania.
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