Why did traditional Africa not develop technology ?

[Sandman]

But shouldn't be Indonesia or Oceania the most developed land in the world, then?

Good point, I've given this some thought myself.

As far as Oceania is concerned, the Polynesians islanders did develop very advanced canoes, but there were several factors which worked against them. The islands themselves were small, and lacked metal ores. They were also spread far apart, and there was no large scale trade between them, as far as I know.

Their naval expansion was organised in the form of tribes branching off into new tribes on new islands, linked solely by culture, rather than a single throne organising new colonies and trading ventures.

The lack of resources on their islands may also explain why they never completed the vital first step of developing ships composed of multiple planks, rather than hollowed out logs.

Another factor which counts against them is that they were latecomers, in terms of history. They only reached New Zealand in AD 900, by which time countless more advanced empires had risen and fallen. Given the time, they could have developed truly advanced wooden ships, since they already had canoes composed of a main body, connectors and outriggers.

Australia has a whole hoard of disadvantages, including zero domesticated animals and plants, hostile environments, and a relatively short coastline, like Africa.

Indonesia is more difficult... I'll have to think about that one.

[Kramerman]

(which i think people here are under-estimating african advancements)

when i read about african advancements, many of them amaze me, but the fact is that they were made in isolation and for other reasons the africans could not build on them. There was some african civ near the ivory coast that had very advanced astronomical knowlegde, but it failed a thousand years ago or somethn.

The same can be said about New World cultures. The Anaszi made many advancements, as did the Missisipian cultures of Cahokia and the like, but these isolated advancements could only go so far in the absence of writing and other key technoligical discoveries. Thus, when these civs failed, their tech was for the most part lost with them.

To say the sub-saharen cultures are primative, is entirely accurate. Yes, at different points in time they made very impressive discoveries, but they could not retain these. Europe was many times more advanced when it came imperializing the place. To deny this is hard for me to imagine.

[Dr Strangelove]

I seem to recall that about a decade ago archaeologists found some gigantic iron meltic furnaces somewhere in east Africa, Kenya I believe. They were dated to somewhere around 1000 BC, and would have been the largest smelters of their era. The industry didn't seem to last very long, so presumably the deposits ran out. Currently the only place in Africa that has significant iron deposits is South Africa.

Another factor that may have limited Africa's development is the difficulty of travel between nascent civilizations limiting the sharing of technology and ideas. European civilization grew up around a central ocean, the Mediterranean. China and India fluorished along the banks of very long, major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, the Yellow. The rivers and calm seas not only nourished the budding cultures, but also provided communication between small states along their shores and banks. Africa's overall geography would seem to work toeards isolating communities instead of uniting them. Africa has the Nile, but the central Nile flows through a desert, the Sudan. Throughout history small states have cropped up along the shores of the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the edges of the Sahara desert and along various rivers in the interior. These states don't seem to have acquired sufficient "mass" in order to survive. It may be significant that the more advanced nation states that waxed and waned throughout Africa's history have generally done so in isolation from each other. Looking back through history you don't often find major states appearing adjacent to each other in both location and in historical time. As an example, the empire of Mali was located adjacent to Timboktou, but was seperated from the latter by hundreds of years.

It should be pointed out that every continent has had it's share of foundering civilizations. Along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers there are remnants of Native American mound cities. We all know about the various short lived mesoamerican cultures. There are remnants of long dead cultures, cultures which didn't survive, in Europe too. Take Stonehenge for instance. The same is true of Asia. Heck, for that matter all of the old civilizations have been gutted and deserted! The reason that "our" civilization has survived is that we have picked up the pieces of the old cultures that we found useful and have carried these pieces onward with us. It is apparent that there have been many instances throughout human history when this did not occur, that the cities were found wanting either by their inhabitants or by their neighbors and so were relegated to the great trash heap of history. Indeed this ending appears to have been more often the rule than the exception. Maybe the proper question to ask is what are the crucial ingredients that allow a civilization to survive?

[Ecthy]

iron smelters in 1000 BC? did any other civilization melt iron at that time?

I thought it'd have been developed in greece and egypt and so on by around 800-600 BC.

[Az]

oh no, Iron working is a Hittite thing, IIRC.

[Ecthy]

eh? I thought one argument against the pyramids being built before 1000 BC was the fact they could hardly work their stones with anything less than iron

I'm almost certain none of those big civs had iron before 800, let alone 1,000.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
iron smelters in 1000 BC? did any other civilization melt iron at that time?

I thought it'd have been developed in greece and egypt and so on by around 800-600 BC.

I'm not exactly certain of the date, but it was in the "first millenium BC", which would have made it somewhere between 1000 BC and 0 BC.

[Ecthy]

yeah, it'd be a biggie to me if they knew to melt iron before the so great egyptians and greeks did

[DAVOUT]

All the surviving European civilizations have had writing from the beginning, or soon enough. And if Africa was not isolated, as some of us believe, how can it be explained that they do not adopt the arab writing, or design their own in the first millenia?

[Ecthy]

from the beginning? you've clearly played too much civ

[Cruddy]

Originally posted by DAVOUT
All the surviving European civilizations have had writing from the beginning, or soon enough. And if Africa was not isolated, as some of us believe, how can it be explained that they do not adopt the arab writing, or design their own in the first millenia?

Might want to check out my post for the answer... because individual tribes didn't get big enough, in short.

[DAVOUT]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
from the beginning? you've clearly played too much civ

Played too much civ ? Definitely true. :

And all surviving european civ inherited from the beginning the latin language which was spoken and written. I accept that Romulus and Remus did not have the writing though.

[Al B. Sure!]

Davout:

but they did adapt Arabic spoken language... Swahili is bastardized arabic...

[Sikander]

I see that one of the larger problems with this discussion is that some people don't seem to be looking at more than one factor at a time (the [i]if oceans are so important, why aren't the island peoples of the Pacific the world leaders in tech?[i] arguments here). The advantage of easy access to the sea rests mainly in the lower cost of transport by sea, which in turn makes trade more profitable. This assumes however that you are near enough to a market for your products to take advantage of the sea, which is something that people on far flung islands do not have. It also assumes that you have something that others value which can be traded, and vice versa. When these factors are in place, then both economies become more productive and the regular contacts between them effectively increase the size of both societies for the generation and propogation of ideas, eg a new innovation in one place is noted by traders from another and taken home where an attempt to recreate it may happen.

A lot of people have noted that Africa has had numerous contacts with other peoples, and this is true. The problem is that the vast majority of this contact happened very late in the game. While the societies around the Med had thousands of years to take advantage of contacts with one another, people in East Africa have only had perhaps a millenium to do so. There is also a major difference between people along the East African coast or the Sahel having contact with Arabs and people of the vast interior, who had little contact with those of the Sahel or the Eastern coast. People assume that there were extensive contacts between these areas, but that is not at all the case for the reasons that I set forth in my long post earlier, namely that it is very difficult to travel from one region to another in Africa even today unless you have an airplane. In the past disease zones also inhibited movement. Even after horses and camels were introduced to the continent (fairly late) they were limited to certain areas where disease would not drop them very quickly.

Why did so many innovations come so late in the game for Sub-Saharran Africa? For one thing there just weren't all that many people in that part of Africa for much of recorded history. Much of the land area was occupied by hunter gatherers like Bushmen and Pygmies. It has only been within the last two thousand years (compared perhaps 6,000 or more years in other areas) or so that advanced agricultural techniques together with good metal working have been available in Sub-Saharran Africa in any other than a tiny scale. Without these techs populations were very limited. Assuming that an inventor or genius is born with the same frequency in different areas (just to make a point) a lower population will produce fewer of them.

Once an innovation is adopted, it is by no means a guarantee that the idea will survive the test of time. Perhaps the inventor was the only person who knew how to use it, or perhaps the conditions that created a need for the invention have changed. This sort of thing happens all the time, as anyone who has worked with legacy computer code can tell you. One way to save an idea over time without maintaining the whole economy that may have spawned it is a written record. This is of course impossible to do when one does not have writing. Then one must rely on oral tradition, which rarely survives the culture that spawned it, unlike writing that can often be translated and transported to other completely different societies far away in space and / or time.

So between the less than ideal starting conditions (which the vast majority of humanity have in common with Africa), isolation on a large scale (ie intercontinental) and most other scales as well, Sub-Saharran Africa failed to reach critical mass until thousands of years after more fortunate (in the case of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China) and less isolated (Europe, the Levant, North Africa, SW Asia, East Asia etc.) areas did. By the time of the Bantu explosion it was already too late for most of Africa to catch up culturally to the vast chunk of the globe which had such a head start. The same is true of America for that matter, though the Americans did not suffer as much from transport difficulties as Africa did.

[Kramerman]

Originally posted by Azazel
oh no, Iron working is a Hittite thing, IIRC.

I thought it was chinese? or were the just the first to smelt pig iron? yeah, come to htink of it, i think the hitites were the first, but it was very impure and not much to note. Greeks didnt do it till much later... they loved their bronze