alt Hacker NewsThere is account of the iron discovery in sub Saharan Africa about 2,000 BC[0][1][2]
If we grant, purely as a thought experiment, that a community in sub-Saharan Africa had developed reliable iron metallurgy around 2000 BC, it would be a reminder of how technology advancements shouldn't be taken for granted.
What social, ecological and economic circumstances allowed an invention to arise but prevented it from becoming a continuously expanding technological tradition.
Why didn't that discovery become part of a self-sustaining technological system? It could have led to a very different Africa and world today.
- [0] https://journals.udsm.ac.tz/index.php/sap/article/view/2710?...
- [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-024-01383-2?utm_sourc...
- [2] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-023-09545-6?utm_source=chatgp...
The Nature article is not about 2000 BC but 2000 BP, i.e. before present, with the oldest site around 2300 before present, i.e. around 300 BC.
So these are old sites of iron production, but not as old as the first production of iron in the Anatolia-Caucasus region, from where it spread in Europe, West Asia and North Africa.
In Egypt, some ancient objects made of meteoritic iron have been found, which precede by a few millennia the discovery of how to extract iron from minerals.
Another of your links points to a book "Metals in Past Societies" which is supposed to contain information about sites really older than 2000 BCE, but I am skeptical about the dating until I read the book, because the book is less recent than the 2024 article from Nature, which ignores those sites that are claimed to be older.