1800 BCE: (Ôboui and Gbatoro, the Earliest Ironworking Sites Yet Known Anywhere in the World: Ôboui in the Western Central African Republic and Gbatoro Just …

1800 BCE: (Ôboui and Gbatoro, the Earliest Ironworking Sites Yet Known Anywhere in the World: Ôboui in the Western Central African Republic and Gbatoro Just 100 Kilometers Across the Border in Present-Day Cameroon, Radiocarbon Dated to 1800 BCE or Earlier, Undisturbed Sites with the Complete Chaîne Opératoire of Iron Smelting and Forging Represented, and the Staggering Implication That African Iron Predates Anatolian Iron by at Least Three Centuries): The two sites, Ôboui in the western Central African Republic and Gbatoro just 100 kilometers across the border in present-day Cameroon, can be dated by radiocarbon to 1800 BCE or earlier. The published reports show these to have been excavations carried out with care and thoroughness. The sites were undisturbed, sealed above and below by well-defined layers. The assemblies of ironworking materials in each site are extensive. At Ôboui, all the steps in the smelting and forging of iron, all of what archaeologists call the chaîne opératoire, are represented in materials from the excavated workshop: furnace structures, tuyeres, iron bits, slag, and stone anvils for hammering the iron, along with large quantities of datable charcoal. Now let the full weight of that settle. These sites, of around four thousand years ago, represent the earliest ironworking yet known not just in Africa but anywhere in the world. They are not just too early in time but separated by far too great a geographical distance to allow for any possible outside-of-Africa source for the technology. This is not a single anomalous date from a poorly documented excavation. This is two sites, both in the predicted origin zone, both carefully excavated, both with full operational evidence, both radiocarbon dated. African ironworking is not a borrowing from Anatolia. African ironworking predates Anatolia. The standard narrative of iron metallurgy, still taught in most world history classrooms, has the sequence exactly backwards.