In 1987 the third oldest canoe in the world and the oldest in Africa, the Dufuna canoe, was discovered in Nigeria by Fulani herdsmen near the Yobe river and the village of Dufuna. It dates to approximately 8000 years ago, and was made from African mahogany.
Carthage’s fleet included large numbers of quadriremes and quinqueremes, warships with four and five ranks of rowers. Its ships dominated the Mediterranean. The Romans however were masters at copying and adapting the technology of other peoples. According to Polybius, the Romans seized a shipwrecked Carthaginian warship, and used it as a blueprint for a massive naval build-up, adding their own refinement – the corvus – which allowed an enemy vessel to be “gripped” and boarded for hand-to-hand fighting. This negated initially superior Carthaginian seamanship and ships
In the 14th century CE King Abubakari II, the brother of King Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire is thought to have had a great armada of ships sitting on the coast of West Africa.[113] This is corroborated by ibn Battuta himself who recalls several hundred Malian ships off the coast.[114] The ships would communicate with each other by drums. This has led to great speculation, that Malian sailors may have reached the coast of Pre-Columbian America under the rule of Abubakari II, nearly two hundred years before Christopher Columbus.
