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Comment by voxleone | Hacker News Reader

There 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...

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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.

UPDATE:

I have been able to access the book "Metals in Past Societies" that was claimed as source for 2000 BC or earlier iron metallurgy.

As I expected, the book is far more nuanced than the optimistic claims from the link provided above.

The apparently very old datings of iron metallurgy are datings of charcoals.

The book explains that charcoal datings provide very little information about the true age of the iron working environment where they were encountered, because the age is not the age when charcoals were made and used by the iron smiths, but the age when the tree had grown.

In the area where the charcoals were found, there are trees that live for hundreds of years or even for millennia, and there are also dry places where wood can be preserved for hundreds of years after a tree had died. Dead wood would have been preferable for making charcoal, because it is already dried.

So if a charcoal is dated to 2000 BC, that only provides an upper limit for the age, but the iron smiths who used the charcoal might have lived even one or two millennia later.

I suppose that improved dating is the reason why the more recent article for Nature only mentions 300 BC as the age of Nigerian iron working sites, instead of citing the older claims about a greater age.

That said, the evidence makes likely that iron metallurgy in Sub-Saharan Africa developed mostly independently, though its beginning might have been caused by information that had reached that area from the North.

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