African Science for Kids
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. These people invented boats, probably before 100,000 BC. Around 60,000 BC, African explorers left Africa and settled India and Australia, and then West Asia, Central Asia, Europe, and China.
The Africans who stayed behind in Africa - most of the 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 West Africans began to smelt iron about 400 BC, and also for a lot of cloth manufacturing. Both women and men were involved in African medicine.
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
What does a half-timbered house look like?
How do you spin wool?
(a project)
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. But there were a number of North African men who made scientific advances under Phoenician and Roman rule. One of these was Himilco the Navigator, a Carthaginian man who lived during the 400s BC. Himilco explored the Atlantic coast of Europe as far north as northern France, probably looking for tin to use in making bronze. Himilco reported finding lots of dangerous seaweed, too, so he may have sailed as far west as the Sargasso Sea (a part of the Atlantic Ocean that's full of seaweed).
In the 700s 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.
Al Jazzar was a doctor in Kairouan about 950 AD, under Fatimid rule; he wrote a medical textbook describing different diseases and how to treat them. Ibn Ridwan, an Islamic African astronomer, also worked in Kairouan just a little later. Ibn Ridwan left us the best description of a great supernova, first observed in 1006 AD.
Another Islamic African scientist was Ibn Bajjah, who worked in Morocco in the 1100s AD under the Almohads. Ibn Bajjah wrote a book about sexual reproduction of plants, which later influenced Ibn Rushd. Ibn Bajjah also saw that the Milky Way was made up of thousands of stars close together, and he made contributions to the development of the laws of motion. About the same time, and also from Morocco, al Idrisi created an up to date map of the known world (Europe, Asia, and North Africa), and wrote an account of some Almohad explorers who sailed west on the Atlantic ocean perhaps as far as the Sargasso Sea (but still a thousand miles from North America).
About 1300 AD, under the rule of the Marinids, the mathematician al-Banna did some work figuring out how to write down algebra problems, and some work on fractions.
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 they could use for medicine.
Learn by Doing - al Idrisi's map of the world
To find out more about African science, check out these books from Amazon or from your local library:
African Mathematics
Main science page
Main Africa page
Egyptian Science (part of Africa!)
Islamic Science
Indian Science
Kidipede - History for Kids home page
