Pre-1800 BCE: (How Africans Discovered Iron Without First Working Copper, the Standard Assumption That Metallurgy Everywhere Began with Lower-Melting-Point M…

Pre-1800 BCE: (How Africans Discovered Iron Without First Working Copper, the Standard Assumption That Metallurgy Everywhere Began with Lower-Melting-Point Metals Like Copper Before Progressing to Iron, but in Large Parts of Sub-Saharan Africa the Knowledge and Use of Iron Preceded the Use of Copper, Ceramic Technology as the Likely Explanatory Bridge, and the Implication That Africans Followed a Different Pathway to Iron Than the Rest of the World): This history raises another question for our consideration. How might Africans in the far western Central African Republic and adjacent Cameroon have come to discover iron four thousand or more years ago, and how to extract it? The usual story of metallurgical development is that it began with metals that have lower melting points than iron and that, like copper, might occur not just hidden in ores but as impure bits of metal imbedded visibly in rock. Only after working with easier-to-extract metals would people have conceived of the possibility that, by applying more intense temperatures, other kinds of metals could be extracted from ores. But in large parts of the African continent, and specifically in what now appear to be the earliest ironworking locations, not just in the Central African Republic but nearly everywhere south of the Sahara, the knowledge and use of iron preceded the use of copper. Prior knowledge of copper smelting does not seem to be the explanatory factor for Africa. So the Africans who invented iron smelting apparently did so by a different pathway than the one the standard model describes. And once again, ceramic technology may be implicated in explaining this discovery. The women who had been firing clay at high temperatures for thousands of years had, without intending to, created the entire knowledge base necessary for someone to eventually notice that certain rocks, when heated intensely in the right conditions, yielded something new and hard and useful. The path from ceramics to iron in Africa bypassed copper entirely, which means the entire standard periodization of metallurgical development, built around the assumption of a universal Bronze Age preceding an Iron Age, simply does not apply to most of the African continent. Africa wrote its own technological timeline.