Not really. DNA has a way of erasing all doubts.
Just a few FACTS:
"Copper smelting had been going on in the West African Sahara and Sahel since at least 2,000 B.C. That could have been the precursor to an independent African discovery of iron metallurgy. Strengthening that hypothesis, the iron-smelting techniques of smiths in Sub-Saharan Africa were so different from those of the Mediterranean as to suggest independent development: African smiths discovered how to produce high temperatures in their village furnaces over 2,000 years before the Bessemer furnaces of 19th-century Europe and - 2 -America". (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1997).
A subsequent UNESCO scientific study confirmed Diamond's hypothesis. The study concluded that iron technology did not reach Africa from western Asia but that Africa had independently invented its own iron technology 5,000 years ago. Tests conducted on iron residues, excavated in the 1980s, show that iron was worked at least as long ago as 1500 BC at Termit, in eastern Niger. Material excavated at Egaro, west of Termit, has been dated to 3000-2500 BC (Christopher Ehret, "The Civilizations of Africa", 2002). It would suggest that African iron technology is as ancient as that of the Middle East, the region from which Europe acquired its iron technology much later -circa 1000 B.C. Moreover, indigenous African iron technology is not only very ancient but its inventiveness and the
range of metallurgical practices displayed are unequalled anywhere in the world. "In fact, only in Africa do you find such a range of practices in the process of direct reduction [a method in which metal is obtained in a single operation without smelting], and metal workers who were so inventive that they could extract iron in furnaces made out of the trunks of banana trees." (Unesco, "Iron in Africa: Revisiting History", 2002).
