Africa’s oldest known boat was dug from Nigerian clay
Near Lake Chad’s edge, the Dufuna canoe dates to about 6300 BC—the oldest boat yet found in Africa and the second oldest worldwide. Long before oil or independence, the land that became Nigeria hosted Nok terracottas, Igbo-Ukwu bronze, Hausa city-states, and empires that traded across the Sahara.
Archaeology stretches the timeline far past colonial maps. Acheulean tool-users may have lived across West Africa between roughly 780,000 and 126,000 years ago. By around 61,000 years ago Middle Stone Age West Africans may have begun moving south of the West Sudanian savanna; by about 25,000 years ago some may have lived nearer the coast. After a dry Ogolian spell from about 20,000 to 12,000 years ago, Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers increased as forests expanded. The dugout known as the Dufuna canoe, from Yobe State, is dated around 6300 BC.
Ironworking appears startlingly early: furnaces and slag at Lejja in Igboland have been dated to 2000 BC—and one recent study pushes Lejja’s metallurgy to 2631–2458 BC—while Opi yields dates around 750 BC. Nok culture, often placed from about 1500 BC to 1 BC, produced terracotta sculpture on a large scale and may have developed iron independently between the ninth century BC and 550 BC. At Igbo-Ukwu, ninth-century smiths used lost-wax casting for copper-alloy work thought among the earliest in sub-Saharan Africa, with beads suggesting trade as far as Egypt.
Islam reached northern polities through Bornu and Hausaland from the eleventh century; by the fourteenth century Hausaland’s ruling elites were Muslim, and from about 1400 Ajami texts appeared. After 1804 Usman dan Fodio’s jihad forged the Sokoto Caliphate. Coastal harbours such as Calabar, Badagry, and Bonny rose after 1480 amid the Atlantic slave trade. Britain expanded from Lagos and Calabar after 1851, defeated Sokoto, controlled nearly the whole territory from 1903, and united it administratively in 1914. Independence came in 1960; the Biafran War of 1967–1970 scarred the southeast before a democratic federal republic took shape in 1999.
Source: History of Nigeria
