7. Steel was produced in East Africa 2, 000 years ago
The Haya people of Tanzania can lay claim to an incredible discovery, centuries before many allegedly more-advanced Europeans caught up with them. That discovery was how to make steel, using only what they found lying around them. The Haya made kilns out of the mud from termite mounds, which they fashioned into a cone, roughly five feet high, and packed the kiln’s bed with charred swamp reeds, charcoal and iron ore. Eight men pumped air into the device with hand-operated bellows, and the temperature inside rose high enough to raise its carbon content, and voila! Steel was made.
This process was so effective that it hardly changed until the mid-twentieth century, when cheap foreign kilns became available in Tanzania. Although other countries produced steel at an earlier date, the Haya made the discovery entirely independently of these other nations, which is a mightily impressive feat. As you doubtless know, steel is still a fundamentally important material to many industries today. Unlike iron, its base metal, steel is much lighter and ductile, meaning that it can be manipulated into a range of different items. Making the discovery so early gave the Haya a strategic advantage over their rivals.