Metal is essential in our world but how did early humans noticed that that shiny “rock” is usefull
Cool, why did we start heating rocks tho
Probably just had some rocks around a fire pit and noticed some melted
Or lightning left a mark in a familiar location, and they discovered melted rock and/or even glass.
There's also starmetal. There are a lot of ancient stories about a divine weapon that fell to Earth from the sky. Some of these stories are just cool stories, but some may have been informed by meteorites. Iron in particular that arrives from a meteorite is going to be purer than most terrestrial iron, especially to a civilization that hasn't figured out how to purify iron by hand. That means that anything forged from it--say, a sword--will be less brittle than one made from terrestrial metal. That means it's going to do things like shatter swords made from terrestrial iron that's full of impurities. And if the meteorite is explored close to the time that it hits, the whole thing will be blazing hot.
And early humans would have found Meteorites at the edge of glaciers like we still do in Antarctica.
Yep, meteoric iron is far purer than any unprocessed iron lying around. The latter is always some kind of iron oxide mineral(s) whereas metallic meteorites are made up almost entirely of the minerals taenite and kamacite, which both consist of nothing but iron and a bit of nickel, so the overall iron content can be over 90% in some cases. Funnily enough, ironstone concretions (purely terrestrial aggregates of iron oxide minerals) often get confused for metallic meteorites by amateur meteorite hunters but there are some observable differences without having to test for purity. Metal meteorites reached such a high level of iron in the first place because they are essentially the cores of proto-planetary bodies that managed to differentiate into core and mantle, but then got smashed apart in the widespread collisions of the early solar system.
Metal meteorites probably wouldn’t tend to be blazing hot for more than a few minutes after impact — it’s only ever the surface few mm that are heated as they come through the atmosphere, and much of the heating will have gone into vapourising the surface layers, in metal meteorites this leaves characteristic ‘thumb-print’ surface features known as regmaglypts, a prominent example is shown here. So the surface heating strips away some of the meteorite before it hits the Earth, with the residual heat penetrating no more than a few mm. There are some cases documented where a fall has been witnessed at the point of impact, the meteorite has cracked open, and the interior has been reported as icy cold, which makes sense for an inert object that’s been drifting around the vacuum of space for millions of years. A civilisation coming across an iron meteorite would still need to be able to get some kind of forge hot enough to work the metal, but that’s a lot easier than extracting it from terrestrial rock.
Which is exactly what the native Chaco peoples of Argentina did to make certain tools and weapons. This was noticed by Spanish invaders in the 1500s, who were surprised at the strength and apparent purity of the Chaco weapons. It wasn’t until some 200 years later that a significant metallic mass was discovered by Don Bartolomé Francisco de Maguna, who was following up on the legends of where this high purity iron originated. He named it Campo del Cielo, a Spanish translation of what the Chaco people had originally called the locality, something like ‘field of heaven’. Campo has had many smaller and a few larger fragments discovered in that area over the centuries since; taken together they form the largest known mass of any single meteorite, at around 100 tonnes.
I don't think this is likely. I've found rocks that were hit and the melting is usually very superficial and highly oxidated. Both bad to create anything that looks or feels like metal. Glass is much easier, it happens when all that power is dumped into sand, which unlike massive rock is lots of surface area with air around.
Maybe inspired melting versus directly using lightning strike rock?
Everyone in the comments is talking about how copper would accidentally melt in the fire pit.
In reality, copper melts at 2000F, and a wood bonfire only gets as hot as about 1100F without a strong draft.
It does become malleable though. I'd imagine that this is how people initially started using it - heating it, then making ornaments, jewelry, etc out of it.
They would have already been familiar with using fire to process other materials at that point - they would use fire to harden wood and make it rot resistant. They would also heat clay when making pottery.
I mean from malleable to weapons is really not much of a leap. Pretty sure back then the first thing you tried to make out of anything would be a knife. People probably even tried making knives out of pottery too.
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9d
Apologies for the Wikipedia sources...
There is absolutely nothing to apologize for. People that want to dig into it can take their more refined multiple sources from the article.
But sometimes the smallest step need centuries. The Romans invented the aeolipile "Hero's engine" this is one step before the steam engine but never come to that step before their civilization broke apart and we got a Millennium of "darkness".
Nah. They did not have the metallurgy skills to make a robust enough machine that could withstand the pressures necessary for a steam engine, that is what stopped them. (also the idea that all scientific progress stopped during the "dark ages" is a complete myth)
You can build low pressure steam engines with less than 0.3bar.
"dark ages" was not used in the meaning of a full stop just a dramatic slow down in technical evolution.
The problem is having a use case for that steam engine. The English one was used in mining the coal which fed it.
0.3 bars ? I have never seen this low... But even then, this still requires a good deal of engineering and techniques that did not exist at the time; James Watt did not invent the engine out of nothing either. I'm not saying it is entirely impossible that Romans would have created a prototype steam engine but I am quite certain they would never have been able to scale it and make good use of it (unless we assume large progress in other technologies).
And there was hardly "a millennium" of slowdown. There was some slowdown due to the fall of the Roman empire, yes (did not actually wait for the full collapse either), mostly due to a decline in population, but the later half of the Middle Ages saw many innovations and overall advances in technology.
I can't help but think that if they got enthusiastic enough about the idea of a steam engine, their metallurgy skills might have accelerated quite substantially to support that.
Hero's engine is so, so, so many steps away from a steam engine. They don't work even remotely on similar principles. The first working steam engines, after almost 2000 years of innovation, we're able to pump water out of coal mines because that was the only place fuel was cheap enough to be worth it. Even then, these engines were complex works of art that had to be synchronized perfectly.
In order to actually be useful outside of coal mines, there were several other inventions needed, including the metallurgy for higher pressure systems (as someone else noted), advances in thermodynamics, many dramatic changes to the engine itself, precision machining, etc.
Look up the atmospheric steam engine and James Watt, the first engine and the lead designer of the engines which would power the industrial revolution
Copper is a very poor metal for weapons, stone would be much better.
Copper would be more useful for things like jewelry or spoons/forks/etc.
Only after people discovered bronze alloys did they start making metal weapons.
A pottery kiln however, would get close to that temperature. And could get higher than that if you're not paying attention
And something like tin melts at far lower temperatures.
Iron, while having a very high melting point, could be extracted from ore in a bloomery, despite not properly smelting it, but it became plastic enough to form a puddle or "bloom" which was used to forge weapons and tools with. Fluxes could aid in lowering the smelting point of metals too.
Wood may only burn that hot but you feed it oxygen with bellows and add concentrate that heat in a clay furnace you are able to increase the temperature a fair bit. Early smelting also actuallyused charcoal which burns hotter.
It probably started with lead and tin which melt at lower temperatures then people started messing around with other ores to see what those could produce.
Worth also noting copper was originally cold forged. smelting increased availability and gave rise to the bronze age
It does become malleable though.
Even more, it stays very soft even after cooling down. Which makes it pretty useless for weapons as-is. Only repeated bending or multiple hits with a hammer turn it hard again.
With steel, the hardening and softening is usually now done with temperature changes as well. There are exact recipes how to heat, keep and cool metals to get to a desired state.
Actually melting the metal is not so important, what is needed is conditions required for ores to reduce to native metal, that could be worked. Although a simple fire pit would not produce high enough temperatures, humans had been making pottery for thousands of years before metalworking, and the conditions routinely used in pottery kilns would be sufficient to smelt, perhaps inadvertently, metal ores.
Imagine seeing that and going back to your cave to convince your wife to invest your collection of sabretooth fangs in order to conduct more research and development.
This is definitely a thing.
"Bog iron" is low quality iron that collects when you burn peat from swamps as your campfire fuel.
Early societies learned to work this metal, as it's pretty early to reshape (because it's full of impurities).
Meteorites were a primary source of iron. Barzel, the Akkadian word for iron, means sky metal. We've found a decent number of ancient weapons made from it, including a dagger in the tomb of King Tutenkhamen
we primarily used am as boundaries for our fires, like you’d do with a campfire
but we would also witness all kinds of rocks getting burned in the naturally occurring wildfires
rocks with metals embedded in them would display different types of glow and also, when the metal melts out, if the rock survives, it would be full of holes, like cheese, pointing us to something having poured out of the rock
Number of reasons - with softer metals like copper and gold you don't need them molten to shape them. Someone probably figured out you could heat them and work them more easily. We also made cooking fires and kilns for pottery, we might have accidentally built rudimentary pottery kilns on or campfires over metal containing rocks and realized the shiny left over.
But the easiest raw metallic pieces could have been figured out we could shape them easier by melting them completely. Then we have the potential to put ores of copper or lead or tin into hot fires while trying to shape something and realizing "oh hey these mix" and repeating across stones. Iron is thought to have been found by accident in hot bronze fires on accident and refined further when we realized coals from incompletely burned campfires burn hotter and are easier.
It's a lot of little, accidental, but incremental improvements over lifetimes. Curious humans messing with things just to see what happens. And the use of these materials is largely what defined human civilization - bronze age, iron age, aluminum and plastic - so curious humans would almost certainly work to explore new things. "if we heat this up it does this why not try it with all these different rocks" spread across thousands of years and thousands of combinations of rocks across thousands of minds... With a focused goal of figuring things out and trying to understand it.
Frankly looking at anything like this boggles my mind. Bread is a process that sounds insane if you didn't know what the end result was. Same with beer/wine. Cheese. So many things discovered so long ago by primitive proto-humans we've not got written record of how it was discovered, only how it was refined over thousands of years.
Here's a very fun video about the history and chemistry of bread.
Cool watch, thanks.
Monkeys do all sorts of stuff just to see what happens. Think of all the dumb stuff you've done... Whyd you do that? Some times it was cool, some times you learned something... Othertimes you don't learn anything and it wasn't cool at all (like that time in high-school you still think about occasionally)...
Having some rocks by the fire melt is a good indicator that those rocks are probably differnt than the ones that didn't melt for some reason. And after the fire went out, the once round rocks are now flat... Weird. Let's try putting more of those rocks by the fire, and put something under them to catch the melted rock instead of letting it fall in the sand so we can see what it's like by itself... Hfs it's so Shiny. Love shiny stuff. More rock melting go!
It helps to be curious and not have social media.
When I was 6, I wet a sock with my humidifier water and put it on a lit light bulb. It exploded. Can confirm, something interesting happened
you are only a few steps away from nuclear bombs
Hold up fuckin what? The sock exploded?? Or the lightbulb exploded?
yes
When I found out you can make a blast furnace out of a hair drier, a beer keg, a flower pot and cement you better believe I made one just to have fun melting stuff. And when I was little I'd sit for hours with a candle, just burning shit for fun. Putting shit in fire is just a great time. I have no doubt it was peak entertainment for cave men, even with no pursuit of knowledge in mind.
Ha I just used the hair dryer and a charcoal grill + flower pot as a kid. You were certainly more advanced than I was as a kid. But yeah... Burning stuff is the best.
Literally me as a child.
Let's try putting more of those rocks by the fire, and put something under them to catch the melted rock
You try putting something under metal that's heat resistant enough not to get burned by molten metal but not heat resistant enough that the metal can't melt. I question how this could happen by accident.
Well clay is a perfectly good crucible, and pottery has been around since the last ice age (~28,000BCE). But our oldest worked metal objects only date back to about 9,000BCE. Agriculture dates back to 12,000BCE. So it's pretty easy to concieve that they initially just used what they had laying around, which crude pots would have been fine for smelting copper and lead
Good to know. Did they make charcoal before they made metal? I mean, charcoal is pretty easy to do and doesn't require metal. Is there any way to know one way or the other?
Iirc there are cave paintings that had charcoal used for pigmants. And charcoal is even more easy to find, especially from forest fires. You don't need charcoal for metal of course. You can smelt copper and lead over a basic cook fire using wood with no bellows.
One reason is that you can heat up rocks to keep you warm through the night after the fire goes out
Somebody was bored.
We gathered around the fire for 200,000 years, people were constantly throwing stuff in.
My guess: people made big bonfires and noticed afterwards some of the rock melted and left strange material. Eventually they realized they could shape it and once cool it had useful properties.
one reason would be as a part of pottery. After you discover you can fire clay other rocks that you put in the kilm would have been noticed.
Fire is great for cooking food (makes it easier and safer to eat), but not so great when uncontained. A ring of rocks works pretty well for containing your fire, so it's possible that someone happened to choose rocks with some tin inside to build their firepit, and then got curious about the shiny liquid that came out.
Heating rocks is a simple way to keep an area warm without using alot of fuel (wood) depending on the rock type it can take hours to cool off but be cool enough to not burn down your hut, cave, family.
Ever make a campfire?
prior to rock we were using stone tools, as stone was harder than wood and as much made a better tip for tools, weapons, and arrows.
a rock high in metal ore is notable heavier and denser than conventional silicate rocks and resists breaking. People probably noticed that very early on but could not break these rocks into pointed/sharpened edges easily like certain rocks such as flint, but likely on accident or by just experimenting around someone probably tossed one of these rocks into a fire and noticed it started to heat up and soften, something that normal rocks didn't do. Tin has a low enough melting point that a large campfire would likely be able to start softening and melting it, while a well stoked hardwood fire could melt copper and arsenic enough to start manipulating it. People that were then melting metals would experiment and find out mixing copper with arsenic or tin produces bronze, which is stronger and more durable than copper alone and is still very workable.
Probably the same reason we have for eating eggs... Curiosity
Can you imagine the first people who saw a chicken lay an egg and thought: "We should eat that"
Probably noticed countless other animals eating eggs.
I can certainly imagine that from people who have spent all their lives on the edge of starvation.
I think it's a misconception that early humans were always on the edge of starvation. They were sustenance hunter gatherers, that doesn't mean they couldn't find plentiful food wherever they were, they were very good sustenance hunter gatherers, which is why we are here today.
Eating an egg is not a matter of being so despeately hungry that you try to eat an egg, birds eat each other's and sometimes their own eggs, other animals steal and eat bird eggs. It's one of the reasons birds hide their nests high in the trees. Nobody discovered that you can eat eggs probably because we have been eating eggs since before "discovering" was a thing.
They were sustencance hunter gatherers, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t find plentiful food wherever they were
Bold of you to assume that their hunter-gatherer skills guaranteed them a sated appetite throughout their lives, wherever they happened to be. What happens when things don’t go to plan due to adverse weather, or injury, or over-extending themselves when travelling/relocating, or competition with some other group, or disease/illness? There must surely have been times of struggle and hunger.
They were very good sustenance hunter gatherers, which is why we are here today.
I mean, presumably some just didn’t make it. You’re specifically talking about only those who did and were part of the lineage that gave rise to us. Also, I’m not saying that many of them weren’t amazing at what they did, but the logic of your statement above doesn’t necessarily hold. Early hominids only needed to be just good enough at surviving long enough to have offspring and raise them in order for us to be here today. That doesn’t preclude them from being utterly ravenous for half their lives.
animals have been eating the eggs of other since the beginning of time. Its not weird at all just an easy meal
I always wondered why someone decided to eat a lobster.
In 1500-1700s Europe, lobster was considered grim food for the lowest class of people due to it being a gross looking creature that fed off detritus at the bottom of the sea. It was seen as almost inhumane in some cases, and fed to prisoners as they weren’t perceived to have deserved any better.
Oh, there’s better examples for that. Seafood for starters—who the heck discovered that sea cucumbers are edible?
You’ve never just burned something for the hell of it?
Now imagine you’ve got a cave*man’s level of schedule freedom.
- yes I know they didn’t live in caves
Build a campfire, put rocks around it. Some rocks melted.
Every adolescent boy expirements with fire in some way
what else would you do with them in prehistoric times?
We were probably just hearing other stuff and accidentally figured it out.
Like, you start with clay.
You want your clay dry.
You put your clay in the sun.
It dries slowly.
Maybe fire faster?.
Fire faster.
Now you are using fire to make stuff, and it doesn't take much to figure out that you can soften metal and stuff, and bam, basic metallurgy
Was one way to boil water back in the day when we didn't have pots and pans.
Pour water into some hole, such as a rock indent near a creek or something, and then heat up stones near your fireplace, use sticks as tongs to put the heated stones in the water, the stones boil the water.
If I were to guess, people probably noticed the metal stones were better conductors of heat then regular stone. They would heat up faster, and boil the water quicker.
Because human fuck around?
Watch "primitive technology" on youtube. Guy takes red slime from a river and cooks in a crucible til theres a few lil iron droplets.. then he repeats.
I think it was more about jewelry. Lets take this shiny stuff and see if we can put it on a pendant. Then later, how can we shape the pendant..
Then alot later, how can we get more shiny stuff to build tools.
Ooh, this rock looks shiny, what if we put it in fire like we've done with everything else?
Nothing else to do.
Saunas of course
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
When all you've got is a fire...
Well, there was no electricity back in those days. Sometimes, you just sat around a fire acting bored
That’s what I’m saying. People keep responding with “campfires melting rocks”, but I’ve never seen a rock melt from a fuckin campfire lmao
It’s genuinely WILDLY amazing that we learned to melt down rocks and could mold them into things. That’s fuckin insane. People talk about aliens building pyramids, but to me this is even more of a thing like that. It’s just wild.
I would never in a million years learn to melt down rock, even if it happened by accident, not even if it happened right in front of me from lava or some shit. I wouldn’t have the first inkling of a thought of “huh maybe I could do that melting myself and make things out of it”. The first humans that figured that stuff out are damn geniuses as far as I’m concerned lol
The most important comment here
So copper doesn't need to be refined, it's just good to go when you separate it from the dirt and rock, as opposed to tin? I know it oxidizes
The vast majority of copper and today is made from ore.
But you know how people panned for gold in streams? There are actually tiny little pure gold nuggets in the river bed.
Most of that is gone though and we mine ore today.
Is it mostly gone because humans found most of the readily accessible bits?
Yeah. Exactly.
It depends on the ore source, but there are naturally occurring copper deposits where the copper is more or less ready to be made into rudimentary tools/jewelry.
There's still natural copper nuggets you can find in rivers, mostly in Michigan, in the US at least.
And in many mines there's veins of native copper.
It readily oxidizes, so if it's deep underground and therefore 'airtight' it'll stay that way.
If it does oxydize it essentially turns into a copper-ore.
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I need to know why Americans spell it aluminum and the rest of the English-speaking world spells it aluminium. I remember hearing that it was due a spelling mistake in an early American dictionary, but that could be completely wrong.
Iirc it was a typo in the marketing material for a company that was selling aluminum
Whilst I think it’s largely a coincidence attributable to many factors which variant became most popular in N America vs other English speaking parts of the world, your scenario may well have cemented an already existing trend towards aluminum in the US.
Charles Hall was a chemist who has spent most of his student days trying to figure out a way of separating aluminium from oxygen and finally succeeded with the electrolysis through liquid alumina method in 1887. He went on to found the Aluminum Company of America and make his fortune in the business of refining the stuff from its ore. Could have been a typo, or it could have been a more savvy business move:
In 1892, Hall used the -um spelling in his advertising handbill for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal, despite his constant use of the -ium spelling in all the patents he filed between 1886 and 1903: it is unknown whether this spelling was introduced by mistake or intentionally; but Hall preferred aluminum since its introduction because it resembled platinum, the name of a prestigious metal.
(Source: The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Rivalry, Adventure, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements)
Of so it's a fucking genericized trademark lol
Not sure what you mean? IUPAC recognises both variants as officially valid names. Pretty sure you can’t trademark the name of a chemical element.
The Washington Monument *was* capped with aluminum. Someone stole the cap at some point in the past and nobody noticed for a while.
Nicholas Cage...
Aluminium is indeed one of the most abundant elements in the world - nearly 8% of total earth mass - but early methods for extraction from bauxite ore were difficult and expensive.
When the Washington Monument was built, it was capped with a 3Kg casting of Aluminium which at the time was the largest single casting of aluminium in the world and represented a third of the total US aluminium production that year.
It was supposed to be a massive flex but within a few years a new process for extracting aluminium quickly and cheaply was invented, production rocketed and the value plummeted
Most aluminum is bound in a mineral called bauxite. Took awhile to figure out how to refine it.
Yep aluminum went from this luxury material fit only for the rich, to being so common it’s disposable. We wrap up leftovers we were never gonna eat with it.
Arguably the most recycled metal on this planet
Yeah, when I was a kid, we used to crush rocks for no reason at all, and we were not educated in geology or anything, just fun. Id imagine millions of human across earth would had at least some overlap in those urges and some would have made a breakthrough eventually
This is why bronze (copper/tin alloy) was one of the first workable metals that was useful for tools. Both copper and tin melt at relatively low temperature but on their own they are too soft for proper tooling. But when you make an alloy of them, they are much more useful.
Thank you.
Actually I've been looking to learn more about the history of metallurgy. Do you maybe know a good book on this topic?
Re: Aluminum. A big problem with using aluminum in antiquity is that before the Bayer process, it was hard to find enough aluminum in one place to use. The only naturally occuring deposits of aluminum that are pure enough and large enough for human use are found in the calderas of volcanoes, which represent their own logistical hurdles.
It's relatively cheap to make new aluminum but it's a lot cheaper and uses less energy to recycle existing aluminum.
Also wanna add that humans have been around for ~300,000 years! The nuclear age is literally a fraction of a percentage of human history.
Copper and Tin ores are very common and importantly they melt at a low temperature.
Not low enough for an average camp fire, but low enough that you could melt them with a very hot wood fire.
We don't know how and when humans discovered the first metals but the oldest examples of metal tools date back to circa 9000 BC
It's likely that it was an accident. Krug put shiny rock in fire and it melted.
He then put 2 and 2 together and figured out how to make the first castings.
After that it was a question of finding different kinds of shiny rocks and seeing if those melted too.
Krug no put 2 and 2 together. Krug have shiny rocks and fire only.
Good ole Krug. He was a gatherer and came up with a plan to heat the rocks and then put them in the bottom of his sleep sack. He could finally show Melb that he solved the problem of cold toes. Alas the rocks melted into a sludge and Melb went and slept with Thag the hairy toed hunter.
Worth mentioning that pottery was a thing for a long time before metallurgy. A good pottery kiln would getting much closer to copper smelting/melting temps.
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9d
It was the age of experimentation. The rock itself appeared not that long before metal.
Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
Absolutely.
It’s hip to be square :)
Hey Paul!
Fuck I love this joke, but it contravenes rule 3. Sorry bro, gotta keep the sanctity of this precious sub.
Fair play. Apologies for breaking the rules.
And you have to include Helter Skelter by the Beatles. Many of the metal pioneers say that song showed them what could be possible.
Yes. But remember, “Rocket 88” was the first hymn with distortion. Indeed many of the devout say that it was the first rock. And from rock, we get metal.
For many things good stem from what we once thought bad. A broken amplifier created a new world.
And after further refinement, the rock and metal were narrowed, purified and “punked” to create Wire.
Yes but you overlooked OP's question about rock. If I may take this one.
Rock, emerging in the 1950s, significantly transformed the music scene through its fusion of various genres such as blues, jazz, and country. This genre brought a new level of energy and rebellion to popular music, appealing particularly to the youth. Its emphasis on electric guitars, strong rhythms, and innovative production techniques revolutionized sound and performance. Furthermore, rock played a crucial role in the social and cultural movements of the 1960s and beyond, challenging traditional norms and advocating for change. The genre's evolution has continuously influenced and shaped modern music, contributing to the development of subgenres and inspiring countless artists globally.
And to think, it all started because of a sheet metal factory injury.
That's pretty fuckin' metal.
Excuse me, Iron Butterfly would love a word.
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Some metals are usable/forgeable in their natural state, like copper. They’d make better tools than say a stone hand axe.
Then probably the results of some tragedy involving fire showed that metal can melt and someone thought up rudimentary forging.
The thing to keep in mind is that where we are today was built on minor step at a time. Eventually, we started to understand why things work the way they work and the rate increased. This is big part of why we have seen such massive advances in the last 200 years.
I think this is a very important point. The stone, bronze and iron ages were all around 2000 years in length.
If you think of the start of the Bronze Age as the time when someone figured out how to hammer a copper ore rock into a tool, it took 2000 years to be able to get to the point where smelting was standard practice.
Power chords, humbucker pickups, screaming tube amps and distortion pedals. It happened around the 9000 BCE mark, with the use of the first copper guitars (hence the name "electric").
Just kidding in the first and last part. Trial and error with native (naturally occurring) metals, probably, like copper, silver, gold, tin, and meteoric iron.
Metal-working led to another happy accident: glass was probably discovered as an accidental by-product of smelting.
A teacher of mine once proposed a hypothetical scenario where cavemen noticed that after making a camp fire, there would be small pools of solidified copper coming out of stones on the ground. Then they figured it out from there.
This is not just a guess. There are places where the combination of surface rocks, soil, and type of wood, can yield beads of copper in a firepit.
In particular, Cyprus. Which is why copper has the name it has.
Copper and tin are both found easily. Especially thousands of years ago. And they are relative soft and easy to smelt out of rock.
Combine them and you get bronze.
It took a long time for people to figure out iron working which is much more difficult. Thus why we distinguish Bronze Age versus Iron Age.
And here I am just discovering at 43 that tin is an element. I always thought it was an alloy.
Pewter and solder are alloys that are largely composed of tin, maybe you were thinking about those?
You should've read mistborn (:
tin and copper aren't found together though. was a long time with copper tools before bronze
Too bad Ea nasir wasn't able to figure this stuff out
Imagine you live in the Stone Age. After a rainy night, you come out of your shelter and notice this puddle of brown mud. It is a sunny day and you are going to do some hunting. When you get back, you notice that the brown mud has become hard and you realize that when wet you can mold it to any shape and then let it dry in the sun for it to harden. Congratulations, you discovered how to use clay.
Soon you realize you can speed the process using fire to harden the clay.
One faithful day, you are admiring the last piece of clay you created and notice something different, like a line with a different colour embedded in the clay and it seems harder. You just discovered a trace of copper.
From there, it doesn’t take you long to figure out how to look for traces of copper in clay and/or dirt in general. You start a process of trial and error to separate the traces of copper from the dirt, and from there you start experimenting with other traces in the dirt/clay/rock and start a process of trial and error to mix the traces. The dawn of metallurgy has begun.
Great summary!
The phrase is 'one fateful day' btw
Maybe they were having an especially pious day
By far the best explanation for the question asked, a good hypothetical of the process. Excellent
Fast-forward a few thousands years later, and hairless apes still drool at the latest powder metallurgy steel created.
Yeah, it's me. I'm the hairless ape with the shiny folding knife.
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9d
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Legends say that the bassist for one of those Birmingham bands lost the tips of his fingers in a factory accident, and it caused him to fret the bass differently. This led to a "harder" sound and other bands started to copy the technique.
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9d
Oh, yes. I was looking for this comment
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9d
Thank you for this
He's a blast to watch. Oh you have to know this: Turn on [C]aptions. He doesn't talk in the vids but uses captions to say what's happening. He is active in the forum and talks about a lot of technical things.
Things that can create iron:
Stars
Bacteria
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Humans found natural metals like copper lying about and learned how to shape it. As the amount of easily workable copper became harder to find, humans figured out they could heat up rocks with small amounts of copper in them to get the copper out. In the process other metals would melt to and mix in, sometimes resulting in "better" metal. Because metal became so important to society, humans figured this out and learned how to create alloys intentionally.
In the Americas copper was more common and there was les competition for it. It's been theorized the lack of competition for metal is why the native Americans never figured out smelting.
They discovered metal smelting most likely when people were firing pottery and some kind of ore with a low melting point was added to the clay or just happened to be in the oven.
From then on, it was trial and error
Everyone in the comments is talking about how copper would accidentally melt in the fire pit.
In reality, copper melts at 2000F, and a wood bonfire only gets as hot as about 1100F without a strong draft.
It does become malleable though. I'd imagine that this is how people initially started using it - heating it, then making ornaments, jewelry, etc out of it.
They would have already been familiar with using fire to process other materials at that point - they would use fire to harden wood and make it rot resistant. They would also heat clay when making pottery.
a wood bonfire only gets as hot as about 1100F without a strong draft.
So it could have been discovered when there was a strong draft?
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9d
Titanium came BEFORE steel? Woah. But after iron?
Aluminum is a fairly recent discovery. Needed electricity to get the rocks to breakdown. A kg of aluminum was priceless when they were making the state of liberty. Needed the hall and Bayer process for metallic aluminum.
Look at this shiny rock. I'm a human and will throw it into the fire because... Why not? Oh, it melts. Oh, it hardened again. I wonder if I shape it while it's molten ...
Also, since the topic of both metal and primitive humanity came up, I feel compelled to share some caveman metal because... Why not?
Someone probably made a big hot campfire on some kind of metal ore rich earth and when it was done and cooled down they noticed a crude metal like hard substance in the ashes and concluded that if they subject more of thay earth to heat they can get more of it and make useful things with it.
Iron pyrite can form large square crystals, I'm sure someone somewhere used one to hack, smash or grind something because it's harder than most anything else they had access to at the time.
We've been using fire to some degree for millions of years. Mercury, tin, and lead ores will release metal in campfires, and once people start to use rocks either to line fire pits or as a heat tool, someone was bound to notice when the rocks at hand were ore. Possibly it was noticed several times without an enduring metallurgic technology taking hold. Once you have the notion that interesting substances can come out of hot rocks, trial and error can take over.
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Like many developments in human history, probably warfare. Back when we just figured out how to sharpen rocks into spear tips, some enterprising young human in his shed hut thought, "I need to find the best rocks to make the best pointy bits". Multiply that by a thousand and eventually you'll get one human who thought maybe rocks would do more damage if they're hot, and thus exposes their stone tips to heat. One day they actually manage to melt one of the rocks, but when it was cool it was actually harder than the rock before. This rock may have been a soft metal, like copper or tin, but thay more or less Jumpstart the arms race: some rocks when melted can be shaped into pointer sticks.
How instead of rock spears, which can still chip and dull quickly, you have copper spears which stay sharper longer. Once you know so.e rocks can melt, you try to melt other rocks and see what rocks melt well together. I bet most ancient metals weren't pure copper but dirty alloys of materials like zinc and Nickle, and some people noticed this. Indeed, one of our oldest written historic records is about someone selling subpar copper, so at some point people did understand the importance of melting the right rocks.
Wasn't the first copper cold hammered or something? Like they would just beat down on the ore until something happened? Before they discovered smelting?
Same with electrum, I think.
Likely by accident; possibly by finding globs of crudely smelted copper/tin/lead in the ashes of large bonfires.
Copper is a very nice upgrade from stone for many applications, because it's basically shatter proof, and it can be beaten back into shape once deformed. Only time it's not an upgrade is precision slicing implements where sharpness is more important than sturdiness.
So the story was probably something along the lines of
- Celebrate a successful hunt with a big bonfire.
- Find globs of 'stuff' that weren't there before while collecting ashes.
- Try using it for tools and coming to like it (hurts hands less than stone tools)
- Try recreating it, and discovering where it came from
- Start experimenting on different rocks, badabing badaboom, ya got metallurgy.
Hey OP. It’s worth saying that there’s evidence of pre-and-early historic humans using iron from meteorites - academic-ish link here. Early iron was therefore valuable. Tutankhamen was buried with two daggers - one pure gold, one pure iron, the latter which will have come from a meteorite
The following is now speculation - but I imagine that cultures who used iron from meteorites were able to put two and two together regards it being a natural substance and unrelated results from specs of iron appearing from certain types of fires, probably used for copper smelting.
It’s fascinating stuff though - I imagine humans millennia from now asking the same questions about us!
Early human found rock, noticed some rocks are really heavy. Some rocks are shiny, humans like shiny things.
How to get more shiny things from rocks? Well, just have to experiment. Putting heavy rock in fire cause shiny to separate from dull.
Shiny rock is really hard and can be used to get more rocks.
Eventually, fire becomes hot enough to get more types of shiny rocks, now we got lots of metals.
There's a lot of replies; I'll just add a bit. Some things happened by accident. For example, northern europe is rich in bog iron. How could people discover it? They likey made a campfire in the bog, and after peat (a type of flammable soil) burned off, they probably noticed flecks of iron in the ashes. Which turned out to be super awesome, because iron deposits were quite rare in Europe, and extremely hard to mine those days, since they're in the mountains, often made of granite and such. While soft bog peat and clay are quite easy to dig and immediately brought economy to areas that had it. (also, you don't have much any other economy living next to a bog, since you can't plow fields there). In case of vikings, it's one of the biggest advantages they had.
Before humans were using metal they were using stones. So they would have come across what are known as "Native metals" when using stone tools. Native metals are metals that can be found as a metal without needing to smelt them into metal.
They would notice that the metals fracture less often and are in some ways harder than the other stones.
We actually see this with several more recent groups of people who either discovered iron meteorites or the incredibly rare sources of Native Iron. They would use stone tool techniques to shape the raw metals into tools without needing to melt or forge them.
Animals have evolved senses that notice “different and new”. Metal is shiny. Animals—including humans—noticed shiny things. Humans have hands and can use objects as tools. So they could interact with shiny things. In playing with shiny things, they discovered things about them. Could hold water. Malleable. Ductile. Magnetism. Heat conduction. Eventually, carries electrical current. Some better than others. Some, selectively. Semiconductors. Superconductors.
TL;DR — People are curious, and attracted to shiny things. Then they use their hands to interact with, play with, and experiment with new things, including the shiny ones.
When locals were harvesting clay from the wall of a riverbed (*to make clay pots to store food-seed away from rodents and insects), some of the clay was greenish.
When heating the clay pots in a kiln/oven to harden them, the greenish clay was copper oxide, and it would weep out and form copper beads.
You could collect the beads and then melt them in a clay bowl (*crucible) and then pour the liquid copper into a sand mold. Copper axe-heads were sharper and longer lasting than bone or wood tools/weapons.
Someone tried to melt everything they could find, and discovered that tin will also melt and be castable.
Somewhere along the way, someone cast some copper in a crucible that still had a little tin in it. The result was much harder and stronger than copper or tin.
That was the beginning of the "bronze age". But more importantly, it kicked off the idea of experimenting...
Well, Tony Iommi lost a finger or two in a work related accident. The prosthetic finger tips meant he could only play certain types of guitar chords. Primarily, it is relatively easy to play two string chords with the soft part of ones finger. These are called power chords. They make the gritty, powerful sound we associate with Metal. Thus, Heavy Metal was born through Black Sabbath.....\m/
Metal is harder than rocks.
You know how we had stone tools? where caveman had stone on a stick? well stone can break.
Someone came across shiny stone, put it on a stick, and its like the Excalibur of cavepeople, its tougher and more resilient to bashing.
more and more people have access to shiny stone tool, someone finds shiny stone can be melted then shaped sharper, and you got forging.
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Metallic copper can be found as is, as can gold and some others
Other metals can be refined from their ores with intense heat. Tin and lead are very easy to melt, and we can combine them with other metals to get bronze and peuter.
It was just kind of trial and error, but once you find the right rocks, you can replicate the process with similar looking rocks.
When we get to iron, that's when metallurgy really took off. It takes much more heat to melt iron than it does copper, lead, or tin, some needed to find how to make a hotter fire first. Bellows had existed for some time, but you need a lot of air flow to get a wood fire hot enough to melt iron. Coal would help immensely in getting fires that hot
Aluminum was an incredibly hard metal to make, despite being the most common metal in the Earth's crust. The Washington Monument is capped with aluminum, and Napolean had a set of aluminum silverware because it was so valuable. Once we harnessed electricity, we could refine aluminum through the Bayer process, making aluminum super cheap.