---
title: "History of science and technology in Africa"
chunk: 2/21
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_Africa"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:12:40.805209+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Eastern Africa ===
Megalithic "pillar sites", known as "namoratunga", date to as early as 5,000 years ago and can be found surrounding Lake Turkana in Kenya. Although somewhat controversial today, initial interpretations suggested that they were used by Cushitic speaking people as an alignment with star systems tuned to a lunar calendar of 354 days.

=== Southern Africa ===
Today, South Africa has cultivated a burgeoning astronomy community. It hosts the Southern African Large Telescope, the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. South Africa is currently building the Karoo Array Telescope as a pathfinder for the $20 billion Square Kilometer Array project. South Africa is a finalist, with Australia, to be the host of the SKA.
Due to archeological findings it has been speculated that the kingdoms of Zimbabwe such as Great Zimbabwe and mapungubwe used astronomy. Monolith stones with special engravings thought to be used to track Venus were found. They were compared to Mayan calendars and were found to be more accurate than them

== Mathematics ==
According to Paulus Gerdes, the development of geometrical thinking started early in African history, as early humans learned to "geometricize" in the context of their labor activities. For example, the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa learned to track animals, learned to recognize and interpret spoors. They got to know that the shape of the spoor provided information on what animal passed by, how long ago, if it was hungry or not, etc. Such developments propelled Louis Liebenberg to posit that the critical attitude of contemporary Kalahari Desert trackers and the role of critical discussion in tracking suggest that the rationalist tradition of science may well have been practiced by hunter-gatherers long before the advent of the Greek philosophic schools. Rock paintings and engravings from all over Africa have been reported. Some of these artifacts date back to several hundreds of years, and others several thousands. They often have geometric structures. Other archaeological finds that indicate geometrical explorations by African hunters, farmers and artisans are stone and metal tools and ceramics. Particularly exceptional are archaeological finds of perishable materials such as baskets, textiles, and wooden objects. The finds from the Tellem are extremely important, as they provide ideas of earlier geometrical explorations. Clear evidence of the exploration of forms, shapes and symmetries exists in the archaeological finds from caves in the Cliff of Bandiagara in the center of Mali. The earliest buildings in the caves are cylindrical granaries made of mud coils that date from the 3rd to the 2nd century BCE.

=== Central and Southern Africa ===
The Lebombo bone from the mountains between Swaziland and South Africa may be the oldest known mathematical artifact. It dates from 35,000 BCE and consists of 29 distinct notches that were deliberately cut into a baboon's fibula.
The Ishango bone is a bone tool from the Democratic Republic of Congo dated to the Upper Paleolithic era, about 18,000 to 20,000 BCE. It is also a baboon's fibula, with a sharp piece of quartz affixed to one end, perhaps for engraving or writing. It was first thought to be a tally stick, as it has a series of tally marks carved in three columns running the length of the tool, but some scientists have suggested that the groupings of notches indicate a mathematical understanding that goes beyond counting. 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, or it may have been made by a woman keeping track of her menstrual cycle.
The Bushong people can distinguish graphs that have Eulerian paths and those that do not. They use such graphs for purposes including embroidery or political prestige. According to a European ethnologist in 1905, Bushong children were not only aware of the conditions which determine whether a given graph is traceable, but they also knew the procedure that permitted it to be drawn most expeditiously. There are various textbooks made by mathematicians using such culturally based graphs and designs to teach mathematics, such as those made by Paulus Gerdes. According to ethnomathematician Claudia Zaslavsky; 

Students of all ages and all ethnic backgrounds, as well as their instructors, are fascinated by the Bushoong and Chokwe networks and are impressed by the failure of the European ethnologist Emil Torday to solve the problem set to him by Bushoong children, a problem that presents a challenge to American students and their teachers as well, but was solved easily by African children.
The "sona" drawing tradition of Angola also exhibit certain mathematical ideas.
In 1982, Rebecca Walo Omana became the first female mathematics professor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

=== Northern Africa and the Nile Valley ===
By the predynastic Naqada period in Egypt, people had fully developed a numeral system. 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. Texts such as the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Moscow Mathematical Papyrus show that the ancient Egyptians could perform the four basic mathematical operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—use fractions, knew the formula to compute the volume of a frustum, and calculate the surface areas of triangles, circles and even hemispheres. They understood basic concepts of algebra and geometry, and could solve simple sets of simultaneous equations.