The increasing presence of long-distance exchange, an increase in local conflicts, and the introduction of bronze and iron metallurgy are trends denoting the end of the Mumun around 300 BCE.
12.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, iron-working technologies were either invented independently or came across the Sahara from the north ( see " iron metallurgy in Africa " ).
13.
From the mid-1970s there were new claims for independent invention of iron smelting on central Niger and from 1994 1999 UNESCO funded an initiative " Les Routes du Fer en Afrique / The Iron Routes in Africa " to investigate the origins and spread of iron metallurgy in Africa.
14.
The linguist Christopher Ehret argues that the first words for iron-working in Bantu languages were borrowed from Central Sudanic languages, probably somewhere in the vicinity of modern Uganda and Kenya, while Jan Vansina argues instead that they originated in non-Bantu languages in Nigeria, and that iron metallurgy spread southwards and eastwards to speakers of Bantu languages, which had already dispersed into the Congo rainforest and into the Great Lakes region.
15.
Whichever of these interpretations is correct, the archaeological evidence clearly indicates that iron and cereal agriculture ( millet and sorghum ) spread together from southern Tanzania and northern Zambia, starting in the first century BC, all the way south to the eastern Cape region of present South Africa, which was reached by the third of fourth century AD It seems highly probable that both iron metallurgy and cereal agriculture were spread through this vast area by migrations of people speaking Bantu languages.
