Nubians and Ethiopians are not lightskinned, neither are West Africans where there has been iron-working dated to at least 2000 years. Saying "NUH UH Europeans bought those there because you see Europe had iron working BEFORE that!" is disingenuous at its best. Africa is not poor in iron and it had developed communities and states with military why wouldn't it have fucking iron working?
I was going to say Nubia, but I figured he would argue that was trade/cultural contact with Egypt further down the Nile.
I know exactly what he would say about Nigerian ironworking from later than 600BC: well known Phoenician/Carthaginian trade route.
His argument is that none of this was discovered locally. He’s probably right. Big deal. You could say the same thing about everywhere on earth (including Europe) outside of Egypt/Mesopotamia, the North China plain and the Indus Basin.
But the idea that any civilization would skip copper and bronze and go right to terrestrial iron working
on its own is not credible. Copper and gold are the metals every civilization starts with because there are lots of sources that don’t need to be refined; in many cases they don’t even need to be heated. Once you have people who work with copper, it’s not a stretch to imagine them trying to improve it. You stumble on a deposit of copper and tin, or copper and arsenic, apply some heat and you’ve got bronze. If you have a copper age, you pick up basic smelting to get copper out of malachite. But sub-Saharan Africa had no chalcolithic period and it had no Bronze Age.
Eurasian civilizations had been tooling around with rare meteoric iron (which is the only raw iron that doesn’t need to be smelted on earth) for over a thousand years before they figured out how to get temperatures high enough to smelt terrestrial iron ore into something workable.
You need at least a primitive blast furnace/bloomery to turn iron ore into anything useful, and that’s a very strange innovation for a culture with no history of metalworking to stumble on. There’s no other reason to get temperatures that high, it’s very hard work, and there are much easier things to smelt in the first place. Plenty of copper in sub-saharan Africa, too, but they didn’t do anything with it. Why would iron be different unless they picked it up somewhere else?
The fact that bronze working and iron smelting show up in sub-saharan Africa at the exact same time is another pretty powerful argument for cultural diffusion.
I don’t think this means anything beyond the fact that western, central and southern Africa are really geographically isolated.
And I don’t see how anyone could use this as an argument in favor of whitey. Europeans didn’t discover any of this shit either, they just happened to be closer to the degenerate asiatics who created civilization.
