Iron't you glad I made this video? Check out From Nothing's: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3wP9dES2dkM.html & Ollie Bye's: Not finished yet but I'll update this soon.
@@OkurkaBinLadin I thought most people with even the slightest bit of interest in trade in antiquity would know of them. Not to even mention D'mt and the succeeding Aksumite Kingdom that was very much up and running in antiquity, I'd say they're pretty well known.
@@TaariikhdaAfrika to you but most westerners bought the racist drivel of colonialism and savages and still believe it till now so the concept of advanced African civilisations other than Egypt is straight up heresy to them
Kinda irritates me when people think Egypt and Nubia as the only civilizations worth mentioning. When will they mention that fucking Mansa Musa, the richest man in history spent so much gold in Egypt that he fucking destroyed their economy for an entire decade!?
The problem with iron artifacts is that it becomes very hard very quickly to get well preserved iron samples from older time periods. For example: Bronze artifacts from ~2000 BCE are sometimes better preserved than iron artifacts from ~1200 CE.
@@amenrakwamehotepporchprima9307 The kind of dryness needed to stop iron from rusting over thousands of years is pretty rare on earth and also not coincidentally occur in areas where very few people live if at all. iron rusts very easily.
@@amenrakwamehotepporchprima9307 North Africa and the sahara region where people live aren't that dry. Look at the iron stuff used in those places. A lot of rusting still happens. Less than that of humid areas of course, but it isn't negligible and will eat up the iron over a thousand years. 6 iron artifacts that were found. Many could've been made, most lost. And besides those 6(or 2) were made in early days. Its not like nobody made anything from iron in later more recent times. As no. of iron artifacts increased those 6(2) would've become not so valuable. Of those 33% that are desert about a third is the cold desert of antarctica. The total desert surface area is about 18,911,884 sq. mi. The total area of antarctic desert is 5,405,000 sq. mi. A little less than 1/3 rd of the total desert surface.
When it comes to Africa, the outside world always comes at it with the highest levels of doubt, skepticism and underestimation, even when Africa produces good evidence on par with other regions of the world.
Absolutely. Invention of Writing (the writing system in use in the world today) is placed doubt in favour of borrowing from Sumer far away when the Sumerian cuneiform is different from the sound-system invented in Sudan (Ta Seti), the Hieroglyaphics used in Kush and Egypt. The African writing system (often called Egyptian by Europeans) commenced in the same millenia 3,320BC as the Sumerian cuneiform.
> - Pringle, Heather. "Seeking Africa's First Iron Men" (PDF). Science. p. 2. - Holl, Augustin F. C. (June 2020). "The Origins of African Metallurgies". Oxford Research Encyclopedias. 22 (4): 415-438. *Below are lectures (which can be found on youtube) by Professor Chris Ehret (University of California)* Ancient Africa in world history: Innovation, Invention, and Impact Lecture by Chris Ehret (University of California) Africanity of Ancient Egypt Lecture by Chris Ehret (University of California)
No matter which side of the argument you are on, it's clear that there needs to be research and excavations in Africa. It's really cool to learn more about the iron age on the continent of Africa.
Like a lot of "arguments" these days, almost no one is on the "other" side. It's just the same boring cliches thrown about. Scientists of all branches of learning have been mining every corner of society and the planet looking for information and answers. No one serious is leaving out any particular group, race, culture, etc. in the pursuit of knowledge.
@@warrennyexactly they aren’t being left out. Also if a bunch of people went there and started digging and Hod forbid they were white?!? 😂 they’d be racist. Also everyone’s all about the western world leaving everyone alone. So they can do it themselves. Why doesn’t Africa discover its own history if it wants to? I doubt they need or want any help. Any help will be highly scrutinized and I doubt anyone wants to open that can of worms in todays world
@@warrenny It's not that the scientists want to leave out Africa it's that large parts of Africa are inaccessible without adequate roads, and in the case of the Central African Republic, dangerous. Also, communication is way more limited, while someone stumbling across the remains of an ancient village would likely be reported on by that person in Europe, a similar situation in Africa may simply never reach the rest of the world simply due to lack of communication, especially in the central African Republic.
@@Garmin21111 actually my assertion is that people have these cliched ideas that scientists are biased against Africa. When in actuality, scientists are very interested in Africa. So I agree with you that any work not being done anywhere in the world is usually due to lack of accessibility to the regions whether it be political or logistical.
You think they were in the Iron Age, then they what,,, never kept it up? Inventions run in a linear fashion. Why would we look for something when the people are still there and weren’t making anything
Its simply basic stuff. Europeans often find it hard to ascribe inventions to Africans, especially "Sub Saharan Africans". Why spend so long trying to create link between Cathage supply of iron smelting to Sub Saharan Africans, even when some dates imply, if anything, it may have been the opposite. Europeans exist because people and culture left Africa, yet find it hard to acknowledge technology can spread from "Sub Sahara" to North Africa and Europe., even when clearly "Sub Saharan Africans" have been around way longer.
Word. Next they will tell us Ogun is a copy of a Greek god, lol. They tried to say Greeks must have produced Ife artwork, and I've even heard the theory that the Portuguese taught the Benin kingdom the art of bronze casting 🤪😂😂😂
Pottery was the first manmade material. To make pottery you need high heat, a kiln. Mess around with high heat for long enough you notice its effects on various other raw materials besides clay. So where ever pottery is produced given enough time and curiosity metallurgy follows.
Then basically metallurgy could have begun with the Jomon. Personally I think one of the first copper ages could well have been in the Lake Superior region due to the generous amounts of nearly pure float copper.
The same thing could be said about gold. Smelting gold takes some pretty high temperatures as well. Iron spear and axe points were very valuable and useful. Anybody that knew how to make them could get rich very fast. The message would spread widely and quickly.
@@Eidolon1andOnly If they have glaze on the pottery they've got kilns. One thing I think societies need to make the jump to metals is a readily accessible and workable source of metal. And that really only works with things like float copper and iron nickel meteors without smelting.
I love that theory… it gives you a really good picture of a guy who got his kiln too hot one day and found all these weird shiny inclusions in his pottery where copper melted out of copper ore embedded in the clay. Now they try to reproduce it… no good. Get more clay from that one spot where they first time came from and then it works… but only on windy days… they just keep experimenting and refining until they discover how to reproduce it consistently. THEN they discover they can work the metal. I really love the way your theory plays in my mind… it means that there’s a continuous line from the first potter to the last iron-age metalworker!
In science, if you've had an idea, most likely someone else has as well. So it's entirely possible, maybe even likely, that just like calculus, iron working was invented more than once, in more than one place.
Correct, just like the morphic field. There's a field of knowledge that organisms of the same species can tap into and sort of download information from, independently at different geographical locations.
What? He's got a "new" mic spoon? What happened to the old tiny white plastic spoon? What sort of cruel swine breaks the Sacred SpoonoMic baton/mace/fasci, an object crucial to our as yet un-named cult of Milo Info Cargo. This has to stop
Poetry stirs the heart, inflamed passions lead to conflict, conflict drives ironworking for weapons of war. Makes total sense, even if it was an autocorrect typo.
I confess, I've left my own autocorrect misplaced words in a post. Sometimes the change would give it a flavor that tickled my fancy. "There's many a truth in misspelled words." - S. Freud, (Or he should have said that!)
What a man smashing out all these interesting videos! I've been struggling with sleep recently, and I say this in the nicest possible sense, your videos are fantastic to have on if I can't get to sleep. They are wonderfully calming and if I still can't sleep, at least I'm learning about some fascinating topics. Thank you for your hard work and big love to you Stefan!
if you speak at least 1 foreign language, try counting. 1 in your first language, then 2 in a foreign one and so on. I had to use this method twice (yeah, I sleep well in general), and I don't remember reaching 40 (Hungarian, English, German)
The most hated term in Africa right now is 'Sub Saharan' that Europeans and Euro-Americans on Africans. The term is offensive because it seeks validate the claim that the Sahara and Mediterian Africa was a Eurasian land and part of Eurasian heritage. It validates the claim by White North Africans that the Ancient Berbers were Caucasian Whites (therefore not related to rest of Negroid and other native Africans) when that is just rubbish since there are no native European (Caucasian) genes in Africa other than those devolved from Ancient Aegenians (Greek seafarers), Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Vandals, Turks, Barbary European slaves and Muslim refugees from Spain (Al Andalus)
As usual Stefan, I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I have been watching your videos for quite some time now and wanted to take the time to thank you for all your time and effort involved in sharing such interesting information with the world. I am fairly new to RU-vid and you were one of the first channels that I subscribed to. I can't thank you enough, for reawakening my insatiable thirst for all scientific knowledge! 👍
Hi, I too love learning about hominins of the past. I am interested in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. If you wish, I would like to connect with you
@@averongodoffire8098 I already shared the relevant historiography the first time it was asked but my comment was censored. If you want unbiased historical information this is not the channel.
I just couldn't grasp this radio carbon dating time gap issue until I saw that metal horses head with a fairly light tiarra and it all just magically fell into place
Some Europeans assumed Africans couldn't have invented iron-smelting. Would it be 'ironic' if we eventually discover that Africa invented it first? Perhaps this isn't a 'ferric' good joke.
I still find the racialized geo-political categorizing of Egypt as the “East” as inaccurate. Worse, is the near consistent removal of Nubian Kingdoms of Kush & Axum from the conversations of East-North Africa. (& the usage of the word “sub Saharan”)
The term “Subsaharan” is one I’m surprised hasn’t gone out of style yet. We don’t refer to land south of the Gobi desert as the “Sub-gobi region” for example. This goes back to the colonial examinations of African history. It’s meant to divide North Africa from the rest of Africa in a failed attempt to commandeer the splendid history of Egypt, Carthage, etc.. Classic divide and conquer strategy. It’s our job as history nuts to challenge these very outdated notions and usher in a new era of historical research. One that sees the African continent as a primer location for humanities many civilizations.
I still find the term ‘sub-Saharan’ (used to describe those countries that are not part of North Africa) more adequate than the previous ‘Black Africa’, common during the 19th century and the Western world. But there’s no way to content everyone.
@@DulceN It's not a very useful at all. Why separate North Africa from the rest of Africa like it's some sort of island? Why not exclude the desert regions of Southern Africa from other parts of the continent? Why single out North Africa? As a person from Sahara/Sahel Africa, there has always been a connection between our Northern relatives of the coast as well as our Southern relatives of the tropics. But non-Africans seem to pigeonholed us often to segregate the history our ancestors had built. It bothers me a lot.
Saw a video of traditional African iron smelters making a mud furnace, collecting red soil (iron ore) and gathering village strong men to pump the bellows for days to get iron bloom for their farming tools.. thought perhaps early metal producing cultures just used ore of what was readily available.. copper producers had copper ore.. iron producers had iron ore..
There is a good read published by George Celis 1991 on the last bloomeries in Africa. The technology presented there is so strikingly different from what we know today from the early iron workings in Mesopotamia, that it truly looks like being a native invention especially in western Africa.
It definitely is a native invention. Currently reading _Ancient Africa Metallurgy: The Socio-Cultural Context_ to really get a good grasp on the history, dating, methods, dates, etc. of how Africa’s Iron Age started, but the book also discusses much about Copper which is an abundant resource Kansanshi, Akjoujt, Nouakchott, Khatt Lemaiteg, and the Tigidit cliff, Eghazer basin & Azawagh valley surrounded by the Aïr mountains... Copper is extremely abundant in Africa, and much of it has been found at ancient grave sites like Anyokan, Asaquru, Wasadan, Tuluk, Ingombe Ilede, etc. The book is now a personal favorite of mine...
The use of Irn Bru constantly throughout this video made me more happy than it should. This was so interesting, I love when topics challenge preconceived ideas/stuff we just assume is fact!
@@Robbiekilljoy69 I would definitely. If not at least we know that the west African ethnic groups definitely didn’t get their metallurgy from outsiders.
@Graf von Losinj "stone to metal working is a ridiculous jump", and by that you mean only a jump that non-Africans could make? Or perhaps plastic working served as the stepping stone for other people?
Absolutely, whether they actually admit that or not. Some "scholars" no matter the evidence because of unconscious racial bias, will never accept that some Africans were doing some things before Eurasians. Even if the evidence is looking directly at them, they'll still deny it. No matter what.
I don't know what if they had the first iron age but they certainly have the oldest mine which is the Ngwenya mine on Bomvu Ridge. It goes back to 40,000 years.
idk, the oldest use of iron is there. But it was just used for art not tools or weapons. I believe they traded iron mask to other places. edit: oldest use of iron that we know of as of late. we could find older iron stuff in another place
Most anthropologists do believe that Africa did have many indigenous inventions and creations but the political and physical environment are often too difficult to overcome. The same is the case with places like Cambodia or Laos because of the amount of unexploded munitions and whatever else they have to deal with there.
@@Tachyon836get over yourself, you're not the only people who's been hated by others. much of indo-european study was put on hold because of associations with nazis and has only recently really picked up. instead of boo hooing and woe is me why don't you travel to west and central africa and search for your ancestral history and accomplishments. then you can show the rest of the world look what we did and how we lived
Because unfortunately they didn’t. Where’s the proof? If they invented all of these things, they would CONTINUE it. But when the Muslim Traders went to Africa , there was no wheel, no real inventions whatsoever. They would STILL be there hundreds of years later. Get it?
The Haya people in modern Tanzania invented some high quality steel, the likes we did not see until the 19th century. They invented the method themselves given that no other culture had that skill. So obviously te creativty exists there.
Sounds like West Africa due to its many sites seems most plausible. Might it be that those who want to insist on Mediterranean coast have some bias against it being black Africans? This seems plausible to me, but it'd take more than I know to say for sure. I do know that ethnocentic thinking is often a human way of supporting biases.
Yeah, the Phoenicians were great travelers. It isn't hard for me to imagine that they acquired some of their knowledge from many places, including central or southern Africa rather than vice versa.
I thought YT required that all videos either contained a "holier than thou" attitude by the narrator or repeating narrative of mega-conspiracies involving religion, wealth, ruling the world by aliens.
Maybe the evidence of early African iron working is being suppressed by the systemicly racist governments of the world? It's pretty clear archaeologists are just a group of white males trying to hold onto their view of history at the expense of other races. How's that? :D
My point( which I admit is vague) us how intriguing and pleasantly addicting Stephen Milo's content is without the " junk food for the brain" that more popular but inaccurate hosts that like to omit key facts to push nonsense seem to think people want and algorithm rewards for some reason...but my gosh...the truth is always more interesting to me (and I am guessing many of yall feel the same)
That was really interesting. I have long had a feeling that many technologies developed independently at different times and places. A perfect example is the antikythera mechanism. This required a very high level of knowledge of maths, astronomy and mechanics plus the skills in metalwork to produce it. All of that was lost and had to be re-invented centuries later.
Preceding add: 'This 19 year old boy genius has discovered a way to give cheap air conditioning to the whole world'. How dumb do these marking people think we are? Anyone watching this video knows about the conservation of energy. In physics as in life, you don't get anything for free and there is no such thing as 'perpetual motion', everything has an end.
Saw thew original documentary about two years ago, and they actually did the smelting in a clay kiln...( Of course they did a lot of ancestral worship and before the actual smelting ) But when I saw that hot, molten iron flowing out of that clay kiln, I was flabbergasted!
Guess the Afrocentrics love you now.... Now, to your introductory part: to get iron out of ore it does not need to pick up carbon that would not be iron anymore but steel, an alloy of iron and carbon. What needs to happen is that the ore loses the oxygen bound in it. And that is what makes the process complicated. Not only do you need the right temperature for the iron but also the right amount of oxygen so you don't end up with iron oxide (iron ore) again. And there is where smelting experience becomes necessary. Now, that process does not come out of thin air, you have to understand first what your fire does to ore, and that is best learned with metals that melt at a much lower temperature, copper, tin and so on, or something that melts in a normal camp fire. The next problem is Holt's excavation: there should have been much more slag and iron containing slag. It is known that the bloomery process produces around 5 pounds of slag per pound of iron... if iron was produced in any mentionable quantity there should have been much more slag than what he found. And that leads to the next possible explanation: the "furnaces" actually had little to do with iron and what happened there is that they were working meteoric iron, something we know happened as far back as 3000 BCE.
this... it's the most sane explanation on this africans&iron debate yet so few people talk about it. i really don't understand why people get really weird when the topic is related to africa. i'm pretty sure if the same exact situation happened in china, Milo wouldn't act like there's the slightest possibility of them actually inventing ironworks first.
@@emirkara7864 well, of the Chinese we know that they actually jumped straight to iron casting... now, not in 3000 BCE but in 800 BCE when in most of the rest of the world bloom forging was still standard. Now, few people talk about it as Holl's excavation report, published in the Journal of African Archeology, would have been read by few people... were it not because a diplomat (from Africa) had nothing better to do than publishing it in the official UNESCO journal... and the archeologists started to take a closer look... basically the nicest thing they said about it was: seriously flawed.
@TVPiles What you have stated is a set of suppositions that are entirely derived from nothing more than a personal opinion. There are numerous ironworking sites all over Africa, with no meteoric iron present, and I suggest you review Augustin F.C. Holl, Michael S. Bisson, S. Terry Childs and Philip De Barros _Ancient African Metallurgy: The Socio-Cultural Context_ as they do mention quite often that Iron is an abundant resource in different regions of the continent like the Ténéré Desert in the In-Gall Tegidda n Tesemt region, including Do Dimmi, Azelik, Ekne wan Ataram, and the Termit Egora in the Niger, with dates suggesting that Ironwork began in Niger some time around 1000 BC or prior; Daboya in northern Ghana is another site were earlier Ironwork is know to have began, in addition to Tagura, Samum Dikuya and Nsukka in Mali-blast furnaces at the state date to 750 BC-Otoumbi Mayen-Ogooúe date to roughly around the same time at Gabon, and further to the south we have sites like In’gombe Ilede... Rwiyange(1450 BC) and Rugomora Mahe & BuHaya date to 1750 BC in the region of Tanzania. Iron is abundant resource all over the continent, Méma is another province of Ghana where Iron is abundant, so there is absolutely no reason that pyrotechnical and metallurgic knowledge couldn't have been invented independently south of the Sahara.
... I messed around with "ornamental metals" for a while, made "knife-like objects" as well. One thing I noticed about the serious, skilled practitioners is that they were ALWAYS experimenting with materials and techniques. I have no problem conceptually with "smith-shamans/wizards/mages" discovering and spreading their art through apprenticeships and the like. (Drawing the "sword from the stone" may be an elaborate metaphor for smithcraft...)
I heard an interesting question and I would like to hear opinions on this. You know how 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens emerged in Africa, there were other hominids in the world such as Naledi, Erectus, Denisovans... Is it possible that one day a new Homo species will emerge and live on Earth with Homo Sapiens? The same way Homo Sapiens lived among those others?
We're going to continue evolving of course. I don't think we will split into different species again though because that would require isolation and we're more interconnected than ever. Unless civilization collapses and never comes back we won't split. Who knows what will happen though. We could be hit by an asteroid tomorrow.
Yeah! Gene modification babyyyyyy. CRISPR for life! If we really want, we can modify ourselves and create homo sapiens subspecies that are better suited for the environment they are living. This ain't sci-fi! We can start it today! I'm talking about taking genes of Sherpas with amazing lung capacity, I'm talking about that Italian village that has mutation which makes them immune to heart attacks(these villagers live to 100 years). I'm talking about taking genes of smartest people alive. Transhuman modifications like underwater breathing and wings are so fking cool! I want my gills dammit! I want to be a Homo Atlanteanus! Although this kind of gene editing will open a can of worms. It's like eugenics so majority of people are against it. For instance, we want to eradicate genetic diseases by gene editing, when will we stop? Some people with "diseases" are very okay with their condition and they can participate in society. I mean we can eradicate people with dwarfism and down syndrome but who are we to decide what kind of people deserve life?
@@StefanMilo Self segregation and personal selection amongst groups might do it... Gene manipulation is another angle... Here's me thinking of Iain M Banks Culture novels.
Yes, but not on Earth. People who go to Mars will need to either return to Earth frequently, stay there forever, or perhaps undergo weeks or months of training in a centrifuge. In low gravity your bone mass reduces, eventually returning to Earth would be fatal. So assuming there is a permanent settlement on Mars those settlers would naturally become very isolated from the rest of the species because they would only be able to breed with people who came to Mars or a Mars-gravity spacestation. Note: I'm not saying the low gravity would affect their DNA, and be passed on to their kids, and that it would directly cause speciation; although the low gravity would probably affect the growth of their kids quite a lot.
When I was in africa ivory coast...the villages made their own iron in a clay tower about 8 ft tall. Seemed one could make iron by mistake with the method of a clay oven. Just put a iron oxide lump in or the iron rich soil and hot fire and I bet Iron was around a lot longer than thought,
@@rodpaget9796 I'm sure it was accidentally discovered several times, but I'm baffled who figured out to keep reheating and hammering the bloom after they got their pool of copper. That's a metric butt ton of hard work. My dad was a metallurgical engineer and he had a copy of Herbert Hoover's translation of De Re Metallica by Agricola. It was published in 1556. It might have some ideas...
@@IvorMektin1701 I think we sometimes over think the developments at times. it would not surprise me that the smith was bored and just hammered the bloom while hot because lets face it, you would too, and noticed a interesting change. Maybe one guy, maybe generations of dicking about with bloom led to the discovery of iron.
Stonehenge is soo played out. There's a Stonehenge in Africa that Africans Built if you would like to look that up and research it. It's called The Nabta Playa Megaliths. It was discovered in the Nubian desert, created by Nubian people. It's one of the oldest astronomical megalithic sites in the world if not the oldest. Research and enjoy 😎👍
6:14, the old wood problem is something unique to North American contexts and does not apply to iron furnace technology. For iron making, only specific species of wood with certain properties appropriate to making charcoal are carefully selected to use in furnaces.
When I was in africa ivory coast...the villages made their own iron in a clay tower about 8 ft tall. Seemed one could make iron by mistake with the method of a clay oven. Just put a iron oxide lump in or the iron rich soil lump or two, charcoal, and hot fire and I bet Iron was around a lot longer than thought,
@Shane Ashby Not at all the smelting techniques in many of African societies that produced Iron tools/weapons were very advanced were not surpassed until European industrial revolution.
@Shane Ashby yes that is the case my historically inept friend..there are even some African cultures that produced steel thousands of years before steel was a thing but that's a subject still being studied...imagine being so bias in 2020 my god....
Iron is in fact very difficult to process, no one 'makes it by mistake' in a clay oven, to think someone could betrays a complete lack of knowledge of metallurgy. There's a reason the Bronze Age happened centuries earlier than the Iron Age in the Mediterranean; and on Cyprus, the main source of Mediterranean copper for centuries, iron ores occur naturally mixed right in with the copper ores, yet for centuries the Cypriots just discarded the iron slag and never bothered developing the process for refining it, in part b/c it's so much more complicated than that for copper.
@@almishti Look up Bog Iron and get back to me....I saw what the africans did first hand in an area of dirt that was almost iron ore.....I am not talking about damascus steel either....
There is a very interesting book called “the lightning bird“. Among many other things it elaborates on the use of iron ochre ( the blood of the earth)as body paint in south Africa, with evidence of it’s mining up to (if I’m remembering g correctly) 20,000 years ago. It seems that this would have put them in a perfect position to transition to an iron age
The _reason that Africa has less_ archeological excavations is worth mentioning, think. Archeology is a luxury. _Largely due to European colonialism_ ongoing to this day, there is an enormous amount of avoidable human suffering. It would immoral to direct labor efforts to luxuries like archeology while people are starving. We can expect archeology to become a higher priority for Africans when their natural resources are spent improving their own lives instead of increasing the wealth of neo-colonial owners.
If you have time, you can find that in Serbia they found iron needle, discovered on the site in 2002, is considered to be one of the oldest surviving metallic objects on the planet. It was made from the stainless iron, without any hollows. It is 64.5 cm (25.4 in) long and dated to the 14th century BC (c.1300 BC). It considered a technological wonder even by modern standards as iron of such purity hardly can be produced even today. It is 98,86% pure iron and apparently can't rust.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if iron had multiple starting points. Damn near everything else did, after all. It's got more than a whiff of the lone genius trope to say otherwise. Have archeology types done as much digging around in West Africa as they have in Egypt and the Mesopatamia area?
@Mr. A. Knight The chariot was primarily used in North Africa or the Sahel Region, not in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is no evidence to support the introduction of ironsmithing or any practice by Eurasians, specifically Carthaginians, he even said it in the video. There have been iron smelting sites throughout Africa dating back as far as 2000 BC, which indicate this method was local or spread by groups such as the Bantu. There was little interaction in terms of travel between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world until 600 AD, which began the Trans-Saharan Trade. This issue is also why Great Zimbabwe (despite not being the only stone city in Central Africa) is thought to have been built by Arabs without any evidence backing it up.
@@petergriffin3723 Agree. Except Great Zimbabwe is not thought to have been built by Arabs anymore - it's an old outdated theory - (some thought that in the colonial era, but the evidence has for a while shown the culture and city to have been indigenous).
@Mr. A. Knight I don't understand what you're trying to say? Yes, the Roman Empire had contact with West Africa around 100 BC as you said, but that was a thousand years after West Africa began practicing iron-smelting and there is no record of them having introducing metallurgy in that region. Also even if the Carthaginians had contact with West Africa, which they did, there is no evidence that supports the claim that Carthaginians brought the knowledge of metallurgy to West Africa or other regions. The Carthaginians began around 800 BC, and began smelting iron around 500 BC, meanwhile the Nok Culture was practicing iron-smelting since 500 BC or earlier, with older sites such as Obui in Central Africa dating back to 2000 BC. Not saying that you're completely wrong, but there's just not enough evidence to support outside influence, it can only be logical the indigenous people have innovated iron due to the lack of other metals in their respected regions, or could have been introduced by other Sub-Saharan African groups that independently practiced iron-smelting.
In a museum in London I saw cast-iron statuettes from west Africa. looked at the dates, and did a double-take. To make the statuettes they were pouring liquid iron into moulds. BEFORE Europe was able to get iron hot enough to do better than Wootz metal!
Very convenient! I was just looking into this! I know my ancestors were already working copper for a while before developing iron working as soon as shipwrecks from Asia started landing on the coast of British Columbia in the 1800's. A very cool Tlingit short sword from Alaska is made from meteoric iron.
Wow this was interesting but I did spot one majorly (and one minor) egregious fault: that bacon sandwich seemed to be soggy with rain😮, how dare you sir! The incorrect brand of Brown Sauce can be overlooked because at least it's still the appropriate condiment.
West Africa to me was the cradle of Sub-Saharan African civilizations like Greco-Rome was to Europe, bringing agriculture, metallurgy, science, pottery, seafaring, etc throughout the rest of the continent. The largest, most powerful, and earliest empires existed in West Africa, of course not neglecting the many achievements and civilizations found in other regions of Africa.
I was talking about greco-romans being cradle of european civilazation btw. Celts had seafearing, metals etc. So had the nordic bronze age too, and I believe several other european cultures that was not greco-romans.
Wrong. Cheikh Anta Diop proved that Kemet-Kush (Egypt & Sudan) plays that role for africa. On the linguistic part, he made a comparison between ancient kemet language and Wolof, and the words are almost the same. Other others did the same with ancient egyptian language. Ask chatgbt it will tell you.
What about the iron being used as practice material for students since it was first considered worthless? Would make good use of mistakes when fire got to hot.
Iron doesnt require copper smith sophistication. Its as easy as some small bit of iron turning up in a cooking fire observed by a curious brain that investigates. Could have happened in any generation.
Before the middle of the 20th century a lot of archaeologists would've agreed with this notion. It fell out of favour as we understood more and more about anatolia at the end of the bronze age. But it does go to show how long this debate has been going on and how important iron was in african prehistory. Literally thousands of furnaces have been excavated, west africa produced vast amounts of iron.
Good video. But I noticed one very important mistake: 2:43 "Scottish soft drinks are made from iron". They're actually made from the two main things you find in Scotland. Shortbread and heroin.
I hope the look of the geography has been taken into account here. A slightly different geography, weather patterns, and any additional research into cultural evolution and genetics of surrounding areas could prove to be essential in figuring this out. Where people lived, how they lived at differents times, what the waterways and land looked like back when in relation to trade, etc.
Sub-saharan Africans were making carbon steel when the only other furnace in the world that could reach that heat was a place in Sri Lanka that was powered by geothermal energy aka a volcanic furnace
I've been an AMATEUR metallurgist for years... and watching this video, the penny FINALLY dropped as to why cast iron is so brittle and wrought iron is a totally different thing to that. Yes I must be a bit of a dullard... but still... thanks for the simple explanation that even I can grasp. ;)
I'm not sure I agree that copper smelting was needed to be known to know how to do iron smelting. I mean they are essentially the same process. It's like saying you needed to know how to make flour before you could make corn flour.
Because of the dry air and low waterfall wood wouldn’t decay nearly as quickly in near the coast, so wood could be reused a lot more times before final deposition. Also because of the relative lack of timber found in these areas timber might’ve been reused and recycled a lot more times maybe even for generations before finally being chopped up for firewood. For a good reference look up ‘The case of the Hohokam chronology’ it talks about how variability in rates of wood decay processes (in the environment and in systemic) can be biased towards excessive antiquity. :) I hope this helps
@@phatphat7089 Indeed he was. Except that Donegal is in Ireland, which is anecdotally even wetter than England. (Resident of the UK here, looking out at a misty, grey day).
Camels (Dromedary)was first domesticated in Arabian peninsula or in Somalia. Somalia has the world largest camel population and is the biggest producer.
Once again outstanding thoroughly done research.. unbiased and thought provoking keeping an open mind..keep on keeping on sir..thank you for sharing intersting info..have a better one
Makeing steel is culture, not instinct. Its years of feeling the heat on your skin when you stand a certain distance from the furnace, pouring mesured amounts of ingredients, in a recipe made generations ago. All things that can go wrong, have already gone wrong many, many times before, oftentimes with easy to diagnose symptoms and clear solutions. What is the recipe you may ask? A combination of iron ore, charcoal, bones, sand and pretty much anything else the smith thought would make strong metal. Metalworking was considered more magic than science. Personally, i think it still is.
There was a time when humans thought the Earth was the center of the universe, and now (with time and increased knowledge) we know better. Right now because of which places have actual evidence from archeological excavation I feel we are seeing the same thing but that one day (with time and increased knowledge) we will know better.
A lot of archaeological campaigns in Africa were cut short or outright abandoned starting in 1980 when there suddenly was way to much "biblical archaeology" and eurocentric excavations. In subsaharan Africa archaeologists tended to focus on early hominids. This was more a bias and funding shift not black and white or on/off but funding for archaeological campaigns in Africa was hard to come by thereafter.
It seems in sub Saharan Africa, there was a "jump" from the stone age to the iron (not bronze) working age in the area between Nigeria and Central Africa Republic ca. 2000 BCE. In Nigeria are also early of such "radio carbon dates" in such places like Lejja and Opi.
Firstly, Thanks a million for your excellent videos Stefan! Re your 13:00 question why wasn't iron working happening IN the Sahara? A question that sprang to my mind is - 'what fuel is available in the Sahara that can provide enough heat for long enough periods? Coal or Charcoal? Neither of which are exactly in abundant supply within the Sahara, but plentiful supply north and south of the Sahara.
