Early African Cultures - African Iron Age

With Africa's pre-history providing a high degree of uncertainty due to limited research and a much later-starting historical record when compared to that of Europe or the Near East, even archaeology has so far struggled to fill in many of the gaps (and see feature link for more on human origins in Africa and elsewhere).

The various stages of the African Palaeolithic are covered in broad detail, as is the African Pastoral Neolithic, but neither provide especially firm dates or easily-categorisable dating. In fact the African Neolithic clearly wanders into the African Iron Age in terms of duration. The task of cataloguing human cultures is covered in the related feature (see link, right).

It should also be noted that the archaeological system being used for sub-Saharan Africa differs from the standard European model, which explains a good deal of the dating uncertainty. North Africa can largely be tied to the European dating model, and even shares some of the same cultures.

In sub-Saharan Africa, technological progression was not driven by ice age retreat and recovery but by the increase and decrease in aridisation in the Sahara and elsewhere (see feature link for more on Saharan desiccation).

As the Sahara began to desiccate once more, between about 4000-2000 BC, conditions became ever drier and communities which had lived along the Sahara's rivers and its fringes were forced to move outwards from the Sahara as it became more inhospitable, perhaps leading to the wider adoption of agriculture.

To the south of the equator the penetration of farming practises was minimal. Hunting and gathering continued to form the basis of subsistence long after farming and pastoralism had been established farther north. It was only around the very start of the first century AD that sheep and cattle began to be introduced into south-western Africa, principally through the Khoekhoe migrations and during the start of the African Iron Age.

In much of Africa the Iron Age succeeded the Neolithic without an intervening Chalcolithic or Bronze Age. It is only in the Nile valley and areas of West Africa (Niger and Mauritania) that evidence exists of copper being worked prior to the introduction of iron.

The sudden introduction of iron working in West Africa during the first millennium BC suggests influence and/or trade with Phoenician Colonies along the North African coast such as Carthage. This would include the recently-discovered 2025-2026 site of Didé West 1 in eastern Senegal which started production around 400 BC.

It was the same Iron Age which witnessed the earliest-known major sub-Saharan states. A degree of archaeology has to be mixed with a larger degree of analysis of oral tradition and early Islamic writing to produce starting points for these states, but Wagadou was amongst the earliest in West Africa.

The Garamantes appear to have been a survival of former 'Green Sahara' groups. The kingdom of Kush followed ancient Egypt in continuing to flourish from Bronze Age beginnings, albeit without the same levels of extravagance. Iron usage first entered Egypt from about 1200 BC, although it was not widespread there until about the eighth century BC.

During the same millennium iron was adopted for tools and weapons in the west and in the 'Great Lakes' area which includes early Ethiopia (although iron use here was considerably later). By this time the highly-influential Bantu migrations were already well underway, taking pastoralism and iron with them as they headed southwards into traditional hunter-gatherer regions. It was the Shona group of Bantu-speakers which would found Great Zimbabwe.

For a long time the earliest evidence of iron working in sub-Saharan Africa (outside of the Nile valley) came from the area just to the north of Niger-Benue confluence, and notably from the sites of Taruga and Samun. Iron-smelting at Taruga dates to about 450 BC, within settlements of the Nok culture.

More recent major finds have pushed back the starting point with sites at Lejja in Nigeria being dated to about 2000 BC, and evidence from Central African Republic at about 900-700 BC, meaning that sub-Saharan African iron production can be dated to about three hundred years of its initial arrival in Egypt.

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