---
title: "History of science and technology in Africa"
chunk: 8/21
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technology_in_Africa"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:40:31.520269+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Agriculture ==
Tropical soils are typically low in organic matter and so present special problems to agriculturalists. Indeed, African soils, (outside alluvial and volcanic areas) are in large part deficient in the characteristics of structure, texture, and chemistry which mainly determine soil fertility. Tropical areas do not have a winter season, so micro-organisms continue to break down organic matter throughout the year. Tropical soils typically have very small percentages of organic matter or humus (sometimes as little as 1%) as a result. Soils in temperate climates may, in contrast, consist of 12 to 14 or (in virgin soils in the Midwestern United States) up to 16% organic materials, because the cold winters slow the processes of decomposition and allow organic material to build up over time. In many tropical regions, farmers practice a semi-sedentary form of agriculture, using fields for two or three years and then abandoning them for a decade or more (up to 25 years after two years of cultivation in the case of savanna woodlands in Africa), until the humus content has been restored by natural processes.
Through careful observation, experimentation and selection of desirable traits over the course of 2,000 years, Africans managed to create a rich diversity of Banana and plantain types (120 different types of plantains and 60 different types of bananas). Due to this there emerged a second area of Banana diversification outside of Asia, one with the Highland cooking banana in the African Great Lakes and the Plantain in West and Central Africa. This shows the agricultural skills and innovative practices Africans mastered and continuously developed in the millennia before Europeans arrived into the continent.
Like the natives of the Amazon rainforest, Africans also utilized dark earths similar to Terra preta.

=== Northern Africa and the Nile Valley ===
Archaeologists have long debated whether or not the independent domestication of cattle occurred in Africa as well as the Near East and Indus Valley. Possible remains of domesticated cattle were identified in the Western Desert of Egypt at the sites of Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba and were dated to c. 9500–8000 BP, but those identifications have been questioned. Genetic evidence suggests that cattle were most likely introduced from Southwest Asia, and that there may have been some later breeding with wild aurochs in northern Africa.
Genetic evidence also indicates that donkeys were domesticated from the African wild ass. Archaeologists have found donkey burials in early dynastic contexts dating to ~5000 BP at Abydos, Middle Egypt, and examination of the bones shows that they were used as beasts of burden.
Cotton (Gossypium herbaceum Linnaeus) may have been domesticated 5000 BCE in eastern Sudan near the Middle Nile Basin region, where cotton cloth was being produced.

=== East Africa ===
Finger millet is originally native to the highlands of East Africa and was domesticated before the third millennium BCE in Uganda and Ethiopia. Its cultivation had spread to South India by 1800 BCE.
Engaruka is an Iron Age archaeological site in northern Tanzania known for the ruins of a complex irrigation system. Stone channels were used to dike, dam, and level surrounding river waters. Some of these channels were several kilometers long, channelling and feeding individual plots of land totaling approximately 5,000 acres (20 km2). Seven stone-terraced villages along the mountainside also comprise the settlement.
The Shilluk Kingdom gained control of the west bank of the white Nile as far north as Kosti in Sudan. There they established an economy based on cereal farming and fishing, with permanent settlements located along the length of the river. The Shilluk developed an extremely intensive system of agriculture based on sorghum, millet and other crops. By the 1600s, shillukland had a population density similar or exceeding that of the Egyptian Nile lands.
Ethiopians, particularly the Oromo people, were the first to have discovered and recognized the energizing effect of the coffee bean plant.
Ox-drawn plows seems to have been used in Ethiopia for two millennia, and possibly much longer. Linguistic evidences suggests that the Ethiopian plow might be the oldest plow in Africa.
Teff is believed to have originated in Ethiopia between 4000 and 1000 BCE. Genetic evidence points to E. pilosa as the most likely wild ancestor. Noog (Guizotia abyssinica) and ensete (E. ventricosum) are two other plants domesticated in Ethiopia.
Ethiopians used terraced hillside cultivation for erosion prevention and irrigation. A 19th century European described Yeha:

All the surrounding hills have been terraced for cultivation, and present much the same appearance as the hills in Greece and Asia Minor, which have been neglected for centuries; but nowhere in Greece or Asia Minor have I ever seen such an enormous extent of terraced mountains as in this Abyssinian valley. Hundreds and thousands of acres must here have been under the most careful cultivation, right up almost to the tops of the mountains, and now nothing is left but the regular lines of the sustaining walls, and a few trees dotted about here and there. This valley is most completely shut in, quite such a one as one can imagine Rasselas to have lived in
Bantu farmers in East Africa experimented with all available crops and sought to produce as many as possible.