It seems odd to me that if Africa is the “cradle of life” that it would be discovered during its colonization that most African countries were so far behind much of the rest of the world as far as technology is concerned. Not saying that they had no technology, but they were way behind, as far as other civilizations, especially in much of Europe and Asia, even though life likely began in Africa, followed by large, yet slow migrations of people. One of the reasons I would think, would be that there was no reason or pressure to create new technologies, because they could maintain their way of life without doing so. I could be completely wrong. 
Thoughts?
It’s not PC, but have a look at a chart that breaks down IQ by nation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IQ
A lot of countries in Africa have really low average IQ’s. Logically technological development is more likely with more smart people rather than less.
PC or not, that chart isn’t an independent reference chart; it’s an excerpt from a book of questionable validity and accuracy, and further, Wikipedia is a dangerous* source to use for any topic that’s potentially controversial. Even if accurate, the chart also fails to account for IQ changes over time and the movement of populations through time. And it assumes that IQ can be properly measured in all cultures (using small or nonexistent datasets in some cases). And we have to assume that IQ can accurately measure, without cultural or educational bias, intelligence as it relates to technological innovation.
Half the article you linked to is debating that very data and the article itself questions its own neutrality. I don’t think it’s reasonable to draw such a certain conclusion from such uncertain data.
*I love Wikipedia, but there’s no way to judge a contributor’s experience or knowledge in a field and the default article view doesn’t show whether an article has recently been edited/vandalized. This isn’t GD so I’ll say no more.
Africa had one of the world’s oldest civilizations, that of Egypt, not to mention the impressive early accomplishments of Nubia (the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a room devoted to Nubia). They also had the towers of Zimbabwe, the university of Timbuktu, and the kingdom of Oubangi-Shari, with its renowned horsemen. Tribes in central Africa had learned to make iron very early on – not a trivial technology. Certainly many of these were not long-lasting, and few left written works (I suspect that would be a difficult thing in much of sub-saharan Africa), but to say that Africans were technologically far behind is to ignore these and many other examples.
Oh get a frigging grip. “Dem dar Niggers is Dumb!” as a driving force in world history? Linking to a wiki article which has ‘Dispute’ warnings all over it plus several paragraphs pointing out fundamental flaws in the data and interpretation of the original ‘study’? Please don’t bother paying the membership fee.
My favoured explanation is that generally the climate in the tropics is a little too friendly to diseases and pests, a little too hostile to settled agriculture, and too difficult to traverse for trade. Few places in Africa managed to achieve high population densities and advanced civilizations, and they were generally too far apart to easily trade key resources with each other and maintain economic growth, which slowed their development.
Europe basically got lucky in that for most of history it was a primitive backwater compared to India/Asia/Egypt/Mesopotamia, but it could absorb technologies from those areas through trade, while the climate and geopgraphy was favourable enough to let economies gradually develop to a decent size. Access to the gold and silver looted from the Americas stimulated European economies enough to get them to the critical ‘jumping-off’ point (where technology allowed global expansion) earlier than China. They then had a nice big incentive to go rampaging around, because many places were very wealthy.
If the chinese hadn’t been so focused on internal order and stability they could have jumped the gun and expanded earlier, but why would they bother conquering poverty-stricken barbarians?
Other civilizations were held back by periodic climate/environment-induced collapses (such as irrigation-induced salinity in Mesopotamia, droughts etc.) or similarly just weren’t interested.
Rush out and obtain a copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book was written to answer your exact question. I’m about halfway through it at the moment.
As to your supposition above, the author demonstrates how hunter-gatherer societies don’t have the need (or leisure time) to develop sophisticated weapons, but farming/ranching societies do develop warrior classes. This makes the hunter-gatherers easy targets. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that. Check out the book!
I just want to second that “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond addresses exactly this question.
I am also in the midst of reading it.
This is a GD, rather than a GQ. I think what complicates the whole thing is that there’s no single factor to explain the technology gap, just as you’d be hard put to define what the technology gap actually is. A couple of other factors that haven’t yet been mentioned: Africa’s astonishingly poor soil, and its relatively low population densities. For all that Africa was the cradle of mankind, many parts of it weren’t occupied until fairly recent times.
On the incendiary subject of intelligence, much of it is a question of nutrition. I quote from a University of Sussex website: “The World Bank states that iron, vitamin A and iodine deficiencies reduce the GDP of developing countries by 5 per cent. Research in Ecuador found that when iodine deficiency causes average IQ to fall from 100 to 79 in a community, income halves.”
Without making you buy “Guns, Germs and Steel,” the basic fact is that almost all the stuff that drove the early impetus of civilization came from the same place; the Fertile Crescent. Places like England or Japan that we think of as technologically advanced borrowed the stuff that really built civilization (like, say, the wheel) from those societies.
Some places then lagged behind for the simple reason that they simply did not have the geographical or natural features available to them that others did, which prevented them from either developing technology in the first place or from having it spread to their lands. Places like North America, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa were crippled by a lack of suitable animals to domesticate (Example: Zebras cannot be domesticated, because of their vicious temperament. Horses can. Sub-saharan Africa has zebras but no horses. There’s a huge disadvantage right there.) and a shortage of useful crops, the things that drove civilization forward; the Fertile Crescent was comparatively loaded with stuff like that. There’s no realistic way any group of humans was going to develop advanced technology in Australia, because there are no large domesticable animals there and a lack of useful grains. Crops that grow well in Greece don’t grow well at all in tropical Africa, so they couldn’t even benefit from carrying the stuff south and using it.
Pretty much all technological variances from place to place can be explained that way; places who had access to the important animals or grains were the early cradles of civilization. Places that didn’t, weren’t.
lskinner’s link is nonsense.
A reasoned discourse showing the problems (and outright errors) of the Wikipedia article and its (rather murky) sources is a legitimate response, here.
An attack on the poster who provided the link is not a reasonable response, not a polite response, and treads very close to not being a response within the rules of GQ (or of GD is this thread happens to gert sent there).
Calm down, a bit. We’re here to fight ignorance, not to stomp all over people whom we may believe have expressed an ignorant position.
The centre of progress keeps moving anyway. In the middle ages the Arabs were far ahead of Europe. Then Europe began to plunge forward. Thos was before the industrial revolution. The latter could not have occured just at any time, the social and economic circumstances had to be at a certain point to actually sustain the demand for this new technology.
Steam power was invented in antiquity in Alexandria, but used only for trivial tasks. No proper use could be found for which there weren’t already enough slaves.
Well, another major problem with early Steam Power was the metallurgy. The idea was nice, but it wasn’t until high-grade iron and steel became available in great quantities that practical Steam Power was possible.
Guns, Germs, and Steel does discuss this issue at length, as RickJay and others have pointed out.
I think he’s probably got the causation backwards- some effects of living in a poor country, like malnutrition, can lower IQ. There might also be cultural factors- more well-off people in First World countries are more used to taking timed written tests, for example, than poorer people in Third World countries. Literacy is also a factor- illiterate people are not going to do well on an IQ test, no matter how smart they are.
All that said, I have to be happy as a part-Swede that we’re smarter on average according to that list than the Norwegians 
I have heard it said that a, if not the major factor at play here is the lack of horses in America and Africa, for agriculture work, travel, and mounted cavalry.
Does this theory come from Diamond? I have not read the book yet, but know he talks about domesticating animals.
Did he single out the horse as the biggie? If so, what use of the horse did he (or you) consider the biggest factor?
If I remember correctly, I think that a related idea that Diamond points out is that ideas tend to move more easily east and west rather than north and south, for the simple fact that when people migrate, they tend to stay at the same latitudes, to maintain similar climates, growing conditions, etc. And in Africa, a more or less north/south lying continent, migrations tended to not be be north and south and ideas tended to not spread from north to south. In Eurasia, a more or less east/west lying landmass, ideas would tend to spread east/west across the area more rapidly and pollinate a wider area. In the long run this would lead to more new ideas - a more and rapidly developing technology. This was another aspect of geography having an impact on the development of civilizations.
Actually, I can think of a specific example of that not being true. In the northern tier of Africa, ideas – mostly Islamic ones – moved pretty much south, through the desert, with the camel caravans. Ideas in general I wouldn’t think would rely so much on migrants as they would on trade. Think of Marco Polo, for example.
Another problem in Africa is the range of the tsetsefly, which spreads sleeping sickness not only to people, but to cattle as well. The tsetse fly range therefore restricts the usable range of cattle, and poses another boundary to domesticated animals. As far as I can recall, this isn’t in Diamond
By the way, just because they didn’t have domesticated horses naturally (and couldn’t use zebras) doesn’t mean they couldn’t import them. as I noted above, Oubangi-Shari had famous cavalry.
Specifically, it’s when FARMERS migrate. Farmers have the population (and eventually, other resources) and germ-resistance (almost entirely a function of population density) to drive out/defeat/absorb/kill all non-farmers.
The difficulty of moving north-south in Africa, taking into account the deserts and the Tsetse fly and malarial belts, tends to suport Diamond’s theory, not refute it.
Sailboat
Actually Diamond does talk about the disease belts specifically, and he notes that Africans and other indigenous peoples have no trouble understanding the value of domesticable animals and adopt them when they can get their hands on them. Look at the Masai cattle culture, for example…and the fact that after at least two thousand years, not even Europeans or Fertile Crescent dwellers have domesticated the zebra. The problem is that the zebra is unsuitable, not that Africans can’t even figure out horses.
Sailboat