The Nok of Nigeria

Breunig’s evidence has also reinforced a view held by most archaeologists that ancient West Africans moved from stone tools directly to iron, without an intervening copper age. That’s a leap that few other parts of the world appear to have made. With the exception of a site in Mauritania known as Grotte aux Chauves-souris, where, starting in 1968, French archaeologists found copper tools and furnaces dating from 800 to 200 B.C., and another in Niger called Cuivre II, excavated by French archaeologists in the 1980s and dating from slightly earlier, researchers have yet to find evidence of copper smelting before iron smelting anywhere in West Africa. Its transition from Stone Age to Iron Age has puzzled researchers since Western European and North African cultures moved into iron after first smelting copper for a millennium or so (while others, such as those in Peru, made copper for centuries without ever developing iron). “In the sense of a progression of technological periods, with few exceptions, there was not a Copper Age between the Stone and Iron ages in West Africa,” says Tom Fenn, an expert on African metallurgy at the University of Arizona.

Iron technology was probably brought across the Sahara by travelers from North Africa, says Rod McIntosh, an African specialist at Yale University. But archaeologists are looking at the possibility that West Africans developed iron-working technology autonomously, possibly starting with the Nok. Iron technology, and whether it was imported from across the Sahara or developed in West Africa, is currently a red-hot topic in the scholarly community. Skeptics of autonomous development are accused of denigrating the achievements of African technology, whereas believers are accused of lacking hard evidence. “It has become a political debate,” says Breunig. He will not commit to one side of the argument over the other before he excavates more Nok smelters, which he plans to do with a French archaeometallurgist next year.

One skeptic is Rüdiger Krause, a European Iron Age expert at Goethe University. “When people see that somebody else has better technology, it moves very fast. And iron knives are much better than stone. You can sharpen them,” he says. “Mobility was very high in the ancient world. From the north coast of Africa to Nigeria is not a great distance for the movement of a new technology.”