…wheel, the plough, road building, irrigation, or a written language.
This was claimed by Lust4Life in this thread. Is it true?
Well, either “never” or “discovered” needs to be qualified, as (1) all of these things are common in sub-Saharan Africa now, (2) coastal and northern sub-Saharan Africa has always been in pretty direct contact with civilizations that had such things (Ancient Egypt, medieval Arabia, modern France).
If you mean “never independently discovered,” maybe. But that’s not really very remarkable. Small-scale hunter-gatherer societies wouldn’t necessarily benefit from any of these, and in much of the area irrigation in particular would be superfluous. As for written language, again, why bother? If your language is only shared by a few hundred people, the main reason for writing is to preserve information, and most of the available materials to record on would have been highly perishable. There’s only a few places in sub-Saharan Africa that were large enough scale societies for this to even be an issue, and by the time those came about the inventions were already made elsewhere and known. Why they didn’t necessarily take them up is another issue, but in most cases it’s because they weren’t worth the bother given the existing culture (material and immaterial) and the climate.
I guess if we say that Africans “never independently discovered” these technologies then we would have to also say that all civilizations (except the original one that founded the technology) outside of Africa “never independently discovered” them either. Every civilization just co-ops technology whenever they get exposed to it.
But that sounds just too down-right reasonable.
I understand that England never independently discovered the plough, road building, irrigation, or the idea of a written language: they absorbed these concepts from elsewhere, as most cultures do.
Timbuktu, located in today’s Mali, was a center of Islamic scholarship in the 14th century. Timbuktu - Wikipedia
Not just England, but Europe in general.
And it seems that there are a few writing systems that are native to Africa. Some are even as old as Latin.
Albert Einstein never discovered the wheel, the plough, road building, irrigation, or a written language. But nobody gave him any grief over it.
1.) How the hell would he or anyone know? What evidence is there that they didn’t have these things independently?
2.) There seems to be an awful lot of acceptance that things are invented once, and everyone else picks it up by imitation. I don’t see any reason to think this – I strongly suspect that an awful lot of thibngs get invented, forgetten perhaps, and re-invented. There are a few cases where I can make a good case for independent invention, rather than cultural diffusion.
3.) But some things simply don’t get invented elsewhere, for who knows what reason. Europe doesn’t seem to have invemnted the returmning boomerang. Nowhere in the Americas was the potter’s wheel invented.
4.) How do you even define the item? I could see sub-Saharan Africa not having a full European-style plough with mouldboard (although that doesn’t mean that they didn’t – I’m not familiar enough with the history there), but what about simpler versions? Does it have to be animal-powered? I’ll bet they had at least the Digging Stick and the Dibber.