African Science
African people made the earliest, and the most important, scientific inventions. The earliest tools, the earliest use of fire, and the earliest use of numbers are all from Africa. People in Africa began to make their own stone tools about 1.9 million years ago, before they even got their big brains. They probably figured out how to use fire about 800,000 years ago (or maybe a little earlier). By about 250,000 years ago, early people evolved into modern people. Around 60,000 BC, African explorers left Africa and settled India and Australia, and then West Asia, Europe, and China.
The Africans who stayed behind in Africa - the large majority of people alive at that time - continued to think up new inventions. Around 50,000 BC, they began to make fish-hooks, for instance.
By around 35,000 BC, African people were using tally sticks to keep track of numbers. Ten thousand years later, about 25,000 BC, people in Africa were using bows and arrows to hunt animals to eat, and maybe also to defend themselves against their enemies.
In later Africa, women were more involved in science and technology than they were in Greece or Rome or West Asia. Women were responsible for the early pottery industry, and also for iron smelting when Africans began to smelt iron, and also for a lot of cloth manufacturing. Both women and men were involved in African medicine.
In North Africa, however, this attitude changed when the Phoenicians and then the Romans took over. The Phoenicians and Romans did not want women to be involved in science. And in the 700's AD, when the Islamic Empire conquered North Africa and began to trade a lot with East Africa, they also did not allow women to be involved in science or medicine.
But there were a lot of men in North Africa and East Africa, and in the area around Timbuktu, who were scientists and doctors between 700 and 1500 AD. Thanks to their common religion, Islam, all of these men were able to communicate in Arabic, so they could find out about new treatments and ideas, and they frequently travelled both within Africa and to West Asia and India and even sometimes to China.
In South Africa and Central Africa, people didn't have so much contact with other places, and here women kept on being involved with science and medicine. Among the San, for instance, both women and men learned to identify hundreds of plants that could be used for medicine.
