heft. One can imagine a group of hunters who had to encircle
their quarry until someone had the idea of using cord made
from tree bark to make a kind of fence around the quarry;
his descendants generations later would then have learned to
weave cord into nets to make the process more eff ective. Per-
haps that weaving of nets gave someone the idea of a way to
make clothing out of fi bers or some other innovation that can
only be imagined.
Inventiveness was fostered as people began to settle into
permanent, fi xed communities with the advent of agricul-
ture. Now they were in more direct communication with
one another, observing others’ techniques and tools, sharing
them, and adapting them. Moreover, a critical mass of people
could pool their eff orts to come up with an innovative solu-
tion to a problem. Th roughout ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt,
and Mesoamerica, for example, people carried out massive
public works projects that led to innovations in architecture
(columns and arches), agriculture (plant breeding), irrigation
(t he water wheel), road bu i ld i ng (t he crow ned road), sewage
and drainage systems (the lead plumbing of the Romans), and
the like. People interested in medicine could observe the suc-
cesses and failures of others, over time developing know-how
in the use of medicinal plants and even surgical techniques.
Farmers could learn new ways of harvesting, threshing, and
storing grain. Others who were more interested in craft s work
could learn to make use of new tools, techniques, and mate-
rials as they collaborated with others. Miners could become
skilled at new ways to fi nd ores, mine them, process them,
and forge metals.
Th is process continued as trade and commerce devel-
oped, bringing novel tools and materials to new regions of
the world, leading to further innovation. One can only imag-
ine the excitement of a European wood carver the fi rst time
he or she acquired a piece of ivory from an African elephant
tusk or a jewelry maker encountering imported glass for the
fi rst time.
AFRICA
BY MICHAEL J. O’NEAL
Ancient Africa was the cradle of human civilization, the
home of the world’s fi rst people, so it is no surprise that Af-
ricans were among the world’s fi rst inventors. As the earliest
Africans struggled to adapt to and control their environment,
they naturally learned how to modify that environment and
use the resources that surrounded them to help ensure their
survival and to make their lives more comfortable.
Th e word invention suggests thinking of something en-
tirely new, the development of a tool or process that had not
existed in the past and that fundamentally changes the re-
lationship between people and their environment. Among
the ancient Africans, and probably ancient peoples generally,
invention was probably more of a process of discovery and
adaptation. Over millennia people inherited the knowledge
of their ancestors, but whether from necessity or from simple
curiosity they introduced innovations, refi nements, and im-
provements to existing technology to make it work better.
Th e ancient Africans did not invent fi re, for example.
Fire is a process of combustion that already exists in nature.
Rather, they discovered that fi re could be put to human uses
and learned to control it to keep themselves warm, cook food,
weaken rock so that it could be split into pieces for use as
tools, clear fi elds of stubble to encourage the growth of the
next season’s crop, and so on. Historians and archaeologists
believe that the fi rst human use of fi re occurred some 1.4 mil-
lion years ago in Chesowanja, near Kenya’s Lake Baringo.
Many African developments had to do with the most
basic necessities: food, shelter, and clothing. Africans were
the fi rst to develop Stone Age cutting tools, and in time they
learned to produce handles for those and other tools. Later
they developed a great variety of tools, including fi shhooks,
grindstones, awls, spears, and bows and arrows. Th ey were the
fi rst to domesticate crops, some 15,000 years ago, and to do-
mesticate and graze cattle. Th is took place in what is now the
Sahara Desert but at the time—around 6000–3000 b.c.e.—was
covered with grasses.Stone hand ax (Lower Palaeolithic, about 1.2 million years ago) from
Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, representing one of the earliest technological
inventions. (© Th e Trustees of the British Museum)inventions: Africa 593