Bronze Age - Outside The Bronze Age - Africa

Africa

Although North Africa was influenced to certain extent by European Bronze Age cultures (for examples, traces of the Bell beaker tradition are found in Morocco), Africa did not develop its own metallurgy until the Phoenician colonization (ca. 1100 BC) of North Africa and remained attached to the Neolithic way of life. The civilization of the Ancient Egypt, whose influence did not cover the rest of Africa, was rather an exception from this rule as regarding the whole range of ancient cultures of Africa.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, inhabitants at Termit, in eastern Niger, became the first iron smelting people in West Africa and among the first in the world around 1500 BC. Iron and copper working then continued to spread southward through the continent, reaching the Cape around AD 200. The widespread use of iron revolutionized the Bantu-speaking farming communities who adopted it, driving out and absorbing the rock tool using hunter-gatherer societies they encountered as they expanded to farm wider areas of savannah. The technologically superior Bantu-speakers spread across southern Africa and became wealthy and powerful, producing iron for tools and weapons in large, industrial quantities.

In the region of the Aïr Mountains in Niger we have the development of independent copper smelting between 3000–2500 BC. The process was not in a developed state, indication smelting was not foreign. It became mature about the 1500 BC.