as were ovens

What does 'as were ovens' mean?

The success of human beings depends crucially, but
precariously, on numbers and connections. A few
hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated
technology: trade is a vital part of the story.

Vast though it is, Australia itself may have suffered
from this isolation effect. Recall that it was colonised
45,000 years ago by pioneering beachcombers
spreading east from Africa along the shore of Asia. The
vanguard of such a migration must have been small in
number and must have travelled comparatively light.
The chances are they had only a sample of the
technology available to their relatives back at the Red
Sea crossing. This may explain why Australian
aboriginal technology, although it developed and
elaborated steadily over the ensuing millennia, was
lacking in so many features of the Old World - elastic
weapons, for example, such as bows and catapults,
were unknown, as were ovens. It was not that they
were ‘primitive’ or that they had mentally regressed: it
was that they had arrived with only a subset of
technologies and did not have a dense enough
population and therefore a large enough collective brain
to develop them much further.

Matt Ridley ,Rational Optimist