History of science and technology in Africa

Various functions for the bone have been proposed: it may have been a tool for multiplication, division, and simple mathematical calculation, a six-month lunar calendar,[42] or it may have been made by a woman keeping track of her menstrual cycle.

[citation needed] The importance of mathematics to an educated Egyptian is suggested by a New Kingdom fictional letter in which the writer proposes a scholarly competition between himself and another scribe regarding everyday calculation tasks such as accounting of land, labor and grain.

Since 500 BCE, people in Uganda had been producing high grade carbon steels using preheated forced draft furnaces, a technique achieved in Europe only with the siemons process in the mid 19th century.

[108] Wounds were treated by bandaging with raw meat, white linen, sutures, nets, pads and swabs soaked with honey to prevent infection,[109] while opium was used to relieve pain.

A Munyoro healer reported in 1902 that when an outbreak of what he termed sleeping sickness occurred in Bunyoro around 1886–87, causing many deaths, Kabaleega ordered him "to make experiments in the interest of science", which were "eventually successful in procuring a cure".

At these festivals, the king, as the preeminent healer of the land, accompanied Healing the Body by his doctors and regiments, performed preventative measures aimed at ensuring the well-being of the nation and all who lived in it.

[142] The agriculture of the great lakes was described below: The "beautiful irrigated fields", the steep terraced slopes of the thousand hills, where every patch of ground is put to use, the "well-fed cattle with colossal horns" were "wonderful discoveries" to the Europeans.

A mother would give a crying baby a toy hoe to play with and a range of techniques often superior to those of eastern European peasants, notably the use of manure, terracing, and artificial irrigation.

Their time is constantly spent in tilling the soil, manuring it with ashes, raking it and hoeing it with wooden hoesThe earliest evidence for the domestication of plants for agricultural purposes in Africa occurred in the Sahel region c. 5000 BCE, when sorghum and African rice (Oryza glaberrima) began to be cultivated.

Long disparaged by some Western scientists and environmentalists as "slash-and-burn", ecological research since the mid-twentieth century has demonstrated the efficacy of such ancestral systems, linking traditional swidden-fallow landscapes with enhanced floral and faunal biodiversity, higher returns on labor investment, food security, nutritional balance, and overall resilience and reliability, especially when compared to monocultures.

Throughout western Africa, oil palm agroforests helped to nourish human communities by contributing to food security and balanced diets, complementing carbohydrate-rich tubers and grains with fats, provitamin A carotenoids (mainly a-and B-carotenes), and vitamin E. The source of fats is particularly important within the broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa where the voracious tsetse fly and the trypanosomiasis pathogens it carries make livestock husbandry virtually impossible.

The earth taken out of the trench is piled on its lower side and supported by boulders imbedded in ito.Cattle features as a primary source of sustenance and political and economic power in many parts of southern Africa.

Ethnographic research, coupled with historic aerial photography, showed that forests grew out of the moist, nutrient-rich soils left behind in the shade of abandoned village palm groves.

John Phillips, an English captain who sailed to the Slave Coast at the end of the seventeenth century, was particularly impressed with local cloth, some of which was purchased by the European traders and fetched high prices in the New World.

Bògòlanfini (mudcloth) is cotton textile dyed with fermented mud of tree sap and teas, hand made by the Bambara people of the Beledougou region of central Mali.

The dead were buried with wooden headrests, bows, quivers, hoes, musical instruments, baskets, gourds, leather sandals, boots, bags, amulets, woolen and cotton blankets, coifs, tunics, and fiber aprons.

With woven cloth, the tailor could begin his/her work: drawing and cutting pieces; knotting, stitching and sewing them together; and decorating, for example, a tunic with a plaited band along the neck opening.

Weaving with palm leaves was a highly developed art in Central Africa, and European travelers and missionaries compared woven palm-leaf cloth to the finest European-made silks.

Filippo Pigafetta praised the "marvelous arte" of "making cloaths of sundry sortes, as Velvets shorne and unshorne, Sattens, Taffata, Damaskes, Sarcenettes and such like" in the eastern provinces and areas adjoining Kongo.

Pigafetta noted that the process started with keeping the palms "under and lowe to the grounde, euery yeare cutting them, and watering them, to the ende they may grow smal and tender against the new spring".

Thus, Antonio Gradisca da Zucchelli (an Italian Capuchin priest) thought that the libongos (monetary cloth) he saw produced in Nsoyo, a coastal province of Kongo around 1705, "even though made of vile material like palm leaves", were "well worked and woven ... that it resembled velvet ... and is just as strong and durable.

According to Polybius, the Romans seized a shipwrecked Carthaginian warship, and used it as a blueprint a massive naval build-up, adding their own refinement – the corvus – which allowed an enemy vessel to be "gripped" and boarded for hand-to-hand fighting.

[184] Elsewhere in Northeast Africa, the 1st century CE Greek travelogue Periplus of the Red Sea reports that Somalis, through their northern ports such as Zeila and Berbera, were trading frankincense and other items with the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula as well as with the then Roman-controlled Egypt.

[190] Few kingdoms south of the Sahara possessed a more developed naval organization than that of Buganda, which dominated Lake Victoria with its navy of up to 20,000 men and war canoes as long as seventy two feet.

Built by the Yoruba people in honour of one of their titled personages, an aristocratic widow known as the Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo, it is made up of sprawling rammed earth walls and the valleys that surrounded the town of Ijebu-Ode in Ogun state, Nigeria.

[195] The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud brick or adobe building in the world and is considered by many architects to be the greatest achievement of the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style, albeit with definite Islamic influences.

They had made use of their discovery in composition, creating indirectly polyphonies of interweaving melodic lines that would suggest words to a Luganda speaker, as if some spirit were talking to the performers of a xylopnone or to the lone player of a harp (ennanga).

"[232] The same scenario happened to Portuguese raiders in Senegambia when they were defeated by Mali's Gambian forces, and to John Hawkins in Sierra Leone where he lost a number of his men to poisoned arrows.

The districts mentioned above received their supply of kurdi, as they were called, from the west coast; but the regions to the north of Unyamwezi, where they were in use under the name of simbi, were dependent on Muslim traders from Zanzibar.

They imported salt, horses, wheat, raisins, cowries, dates, copper, henna, olives, tanned hides, silk, cloth, brocade, Venetian pearls, mirrors, and tobacco.