[HN Gopher] A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to u...
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A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding
origins of iron
Author : pseudolus
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-09-28 17:21 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Sparkly hematite mineral was used as a flux by copper smelters.
| Its distinctive appearance may have helped to attract attention
| from ancient miners and prospectors.
|
| Every once in a while I pull up some Wikipedia article with idle
| curiosity of "If I were transported back in time, could I
| usefully help this get invented?"
|
| One result of this is a helpless appreciation for how complicated
| it can be to even _identify_ what kind of substance is present
| without a staggeringly complex dependency-tree of identifying
| other chemicals, assaying tests, and the economic surplus to use
| reagents for analysis.
|
| Things could have been very different if iron ore was hard to
| distinguish.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Absolutely. As luck would have it, many epithermal mineral
| deposits have both sparkly hematite _and_ copper ore in the
| same structure. This is a well-known motif in mineral
| exploration. They show up in the same geography but are
| separated into different layers. You can find many papers on
| the structure of these ore bodies. These are known as supergene
| deposits[0].
|
| The most important features of these deposits is that they act
| like distillation columns for metals. Due to weathering and
| associated sulfuric acid, different metals separate out at
| different layers of the geology. This creates valuable
| concentrations for mining purposes.
|
| In modern mining, we kind of ignore these structures for iron
| mining purposes even though they are frequently > 50% iron by
| mass. If you find such a thing, you are more interested in the
| gold, silver, copper potential that is capped by an iron-rich
| gossan mineral. Iron is a cost sensitive commodity, you need to
| be able to mine it at very high concentrations and scales to be
| profitable. If that mineral has a pile of gold, silver, etc
| distilled underneath it, you'll be more interested in that.
|
| Not all copper comes from these mineral formations but a lot
| is. Often, the hematite is mixed in with the copper mineral. I
| have a mineral exploration prospect right now which is
| essentially this. Amazing hematite crystals mixed with copper
| with strong assay signs of gold underneath. It is a predictable
| motif in mineral exploration.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supergene_(geology)
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Amazing hematite crystals mixed with copper with strong
| assay signs of gold underneath._
|
| Any chance we HN rockhounds could get some specimens? 8-)
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is similar to the "rare earth tailings" phenomenon,
| isn't it. A mine is built to extract one metal, the most
| profitable at that time, and everything else unextracted ends
| up in mine tailings or refinery slag. But, in addition to
| truly worthless silicates, that "waste" includes a bunch of
| other metals at low purity which may eventually be economic
| to extract.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Leadville Colorado was the site of a very minor gold rush,
| that mostly produced large piles of lead tailings.
|
| Until someone noticed the lead tailings were not lead, but
| oxidized silver.
| lightedman wrote:
| "Amazing hematite crystals mixed with copper with strong
| assay signs of gold underneath."
|
| Did you actually assay out anomalous gold concentrations or
| are you seeing the sulfides and oxides that are associated
| with gold? If the former, what sort of concentration are you
| getting?
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I have only assayed samples from the iron cap. You would
| not expect to find much in that part of the formation but
| it still came in at 1-2g/ton. There is a large area of
| visually striking bornite[0] that I have not yet been able
| to properly sample which is roughly the area you would
| expect the gold to concentrate. It is in the walls of a
| narrow, deep canyon at high elevation. The region was mined
| for gold/copper a century ago, so the existence is not
| surprising.
|
| The location makes access extremely challenging. It
| requires 3 hours of hiking, assuming you are fit, and
| borderline technical mountaineering once you get close to
| the site. The lower parts of the canyon are also under tens
| of meters of ice most of the year, which creates a separate
| set of safety issues. When these mountains were prospected
| in the 1920s, it would have been underneath a deep
| permanent snow field. I've visited some of the old gold
| mines in the area for calibration and this deposit appears
| substantially larger than those.
|
| The discovery was accidental. I was looking for a waterfall
| I had seen on satellite imagery in the backcountry and came
| across an enormous chunk of molybdenite[1] while climbing
| across granite scree. I made several trips to find the
| source of the molybdenite higher up the mountains, which I
| never did, but while searching for that I localized a bunch
| of other beautiful sulfide/oxide mineral specimens to the
| above canyon. It gives me a great excuse to explore parts
| of the mountains no one has been into before.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bornite
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molybdenite
| scoopr wrote:
| > Every once in a while I pull up some Wikipedia article with
| idle curiosity of "If I were transported back in time, could I
| usefully help this get invented?"
|
| This reminds me of the book "How to invent everything" by Ryan
| North, to kind of see the fast-path for many inventions :)
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid. Our
| ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart ,
| intelligent and curios as we are today.
|
| With regards to metals, I have no doubt someone, be it a kid
| apprentice or a master smelter, experimented with melting
| different rocks to see what comes out. After all, if you
| already know that different rocks spew out different metals
| (copper, tin, etc..) it logically follows that there may be
| more.
|
| And then someone, be it the same person or a different person
| entirely, would've surely conducted experiments. After all, you
| already have Tin, Copper, and Bronze which combines both of
| them; all with different properties. Of course someone will
| want to know how this new shiny metal the smelter spewed out
| fares compared with other existing ones.
|
| Then some smith will want to try making something with that
| metal, new things are exciting. Many people here are familiar
| with the desire to try out a new Programming language or
| framework just for the sake of it, and a Bronze age smith is no
| different. Then someone will give that mee Iron sword/knife/axe
| a try , duel a friend, ruin their bronze weapon, and said
| friend will be like "holy shit I want an iron sword too it's
| way too good" and bam you got a meme.
| bombcar wrote:
| "That old Copper++ is worthless, you need to try this _Rust_
| "
| card_zero wrote:
| Ideas improve over time. So people in the past have worse
| ideas. This might include fear of change, and some
| mythological notion of an eternal golden way of life, which
| you must dutifully maintain by spending a thousand years not
| inventing pottery, and if anybody dares to try it, beating
| them up.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The improvement of ideas over time is a rather complex
| process.
|
| It's multiple things working together. Typically you have
| to have an excess of calories which leads to free time in
| at least part of the population. While the 'fear of change'
| as gods fault is more of a post ad hoc rationalization of
| the horizon problem. That is any change in behaviors in the
| good times could lead to death in the hard times. Moving
| away from what works has risks.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > Then someone will give that mee Iron sword/knife/axe a try
| , duel a friend, ruin their bronze weapon, and said friend
| will be like "holy shit I want an iron sword too it's way too
| good" and bam you got a meme.
|
| Iron is not a superior material to bronze, if anything it's
| inferior. Iron's either soft or brittle, depending on carbon
| content, neither of them awesome qualities in a tool or a
| weapon. Also, iron's considerably more difficult to smelt,
| and fully melting iron was not possible at the temperatures
| achievable with Bronze Age technology. Even after you learned
| that you need to use charcoal and very high temperatures to
| reduce iron ore, what you got was a spongy mass of very
| impure iron at the bottom of your furnace that you then had
| to refine further.
|
| The biggest thing that iron had going for it was _logistics_.
| Where there was copper, there was no tin, and vice versa.
| Sourcing tin required trade routes thousands of kilometers
| long - no doubt the demand for tin was a large boon to long-
| distance trade across Europe and Asia, but it made bronze an
| expensive commodity.
|
| It required new furnace technologies and a millennium worth
| of experimentation to perfect the art of controlling the
| carbon content (and what we now know is the crystal
| structure) of iron-carbon alloys precisely enough to make
| _steel_ , and in particular steel blades that combine a hard
| (martensitic) edge and a flexible (austenitic) spine.
|
| (For the record, Dwarf Fortress (unsurprisingly) is one of
| the few games that get this mostly right.)
| mrob wrote:
| One big advantage of iron is that you can forge it. Bronze
| has to be cast or cold worked (with annealing steps as
| necessary). You can't forge weld bronze either, so you need
| to braze/solder parts together. A skilled blacksmith can
| forge things from iron quickly and with little waste. It's
| especially important for things like nails and arrowheads
| that are needed in mass quantities.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Good point!
| themotherhucker wrote:
| Very minor semantic nitpick as a metallurgist, martensitic
| and austenitic are not terms that distinguish the ductility
| of the metal, they are ways the atoms organize into crystal
| structures (which do have an effect on hardness/ductility).
|
| Austenite is one of the high temperature crystal structures
| of iron, and is not usually seen at room temperature except
| in certain non-heat-treatable stainless steels, and in
| highly alloyed steels some small amounts of retained
| austenite remains that doesn't get the chance to transform
| due to low cooling rates and suppressed M_f temperatures.
| Martensite forms by rapidly cooling austenite without
| giving the atoms the ability to re-organize into their
| preferred structure (ferrite, pearlite, or cementite
| depending on the carbon concentration). This transformation
| actually changes the size of the crystal matrix, which
| locks in a ton of internal stress as atoms want to move
| around but can't. All of this internal stress must then be
| overcome by an external stress to move the atoms around,
| resulting in a much harder material.
|
| Martensite requires extremely fast cooling rates (on the
| order of 100s of degrees/second), which is why most carbon
| steels are quenched to harden them. These cooling rates are
| only able to be achieved a little ways into the bulk of the
| material, so you usually end up with a hardened case made
| of martensite, and a softer more ductile core that is
| usually pearlite (layers of ferrite [pure iron] and
| cementite [iron carbide]) that form due to the slower
| cooling in the core. This is usually actually more
| desirable than an entirely through hardened piece, as the
| hard surface can resist wear and indentation, while the
| soft core increases the ductility and toughness which
| reduces the risk of fracture.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Thanks, I was a bit confused by the different allotropes.
| Interesting that the martensite transform naturally only
| happens on the surface (which as you say is actually
| desirable) due to the rapid cooling it requires, I didn't
| know that. But of course it makes sense that quenching
| doesn't instantly cool the bulk of the workpiece.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Where there was copper, there was no tin, and vice versa.
|
| There were some exceptions on the British Isles. Even some
| mines that had both.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| > Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart ,
| intelligent and curios as we are today.
|
| That sounds nice but axiomatic egalitarianism might, just
| might, not be empirically true.
|
| We know that there are vast differences in all modern uniform
| populations we have tested -- intelligence is normally
| distributed and the differences between the tails are huge.
|
| We also know that different populations have different
| distributions -- slightly different standard deviations,
| sometimes vastly different means.
|
| Why wouldn't that also have been true at the dawn of history
| and in pre-history?
|
| Since we do now know many alleles that influence intelligence
| and we roughly know their effect sizes (very small for almost
| all of them) and since we can actually sequence really old
| DNA in some cases, we can actually come up with reasonable
| guesses for how intelligent people were thousands of years
| ago.
|
| And what do you know? They _do_ differ. Or at least, their
| allele frequencies do for those alleles that we are pretty
| sure have an influence on intelligence. Some of them really
| do seem to have been pretty dim. Others not so dim.
|
| PS: It's difficult to make an iron sword/knife/axe that is
| better than a bronze one.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid.
|
| Or in some cases, "poor, not stupid" [0], where even geniuses
| had no power or resources to pursue great innovations
| compared to the immediate priority of Not Starving.
|
| [0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-
| they...
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| pretty much why gold was probably the earliest worked metals.
| easy to identify, can be cold worked in a lot of cases. doesn't
| corrode.
| akssri wrote:
| Note: there have been actual Iron-working sites discovered in
| India that are older than this, dated to 1600 BC [0]. A lot of
| this has been ignored (just like the Painted-Grey ware continuity
| from IVC), partly I imagine, because it calls into question a lot
| of the racial non-sense that passes for "Indology".
|
| [0]https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/isijinternational/54/5/..
| .
|
| [1]https://www.lkouniv.ac.in/site/writereaddata/siteContent/202..
| .
|
| Edit: Apparently Tamil Nadu state in South India has claimed to
| have found a site from 3500 BC (not yet peer-reviewed AFAICT),
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62e36jm4jro
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| nowhere in the article do they claim its the oldest iron...
|
| they just had a theory that copper processing lead to
| discoveries in iron processing.
|
| the evidence they found seems to support that.
|
| theyre not claiming this particular site is where the iron age
| started. and it has nothing to do with what some people in
| india did. Maybe they too discovered iron processing through a
| similar process. and i dont understand what racial things your
| bringing up..
| akssri wrote:
| This discovery is only of interest because the Iron-Age, as
| per standard-theory, started around 1200 BC. in the
| Caucuses/Anatolia or the near-East - which fits with another
| theory which claims that this allowed the "Aryans" to invade
| India with their technological superiority around this same
| time and replace the (dark-skinned) natives genetically.
|
| (Note: the above is obviously a caricature, but current
| versions of theory don't change the structure, only the
| emphasis on "race").
|
| No one would care about a copper-smelt site from 500 BC.; nor
| would they care about this one if the Indian archaeological
| claims were accepted (but that one also destroys centuries of
| Western history-making about India, and all the social-
| theories that depend on it).
|
| This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer
| that people don't pull on this thread. For more information
| on how 'race' was ingested into Indology, I'd refer the
| interested reader to the excellent book by Adluri/Bagchi [0].
|
| [0] https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-
| abstract/120/3/1132/197...
| card_zero wrote:
| > This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd
| prefer that people don't pull on this thread
|
| You want to say your piece and get no back-chat?
|
| Romans started to hit people with iron swords at a certain
| date, influencing the history of Europe substantially, so
| the origin of _that_ iron age is interesting. Elsewhere, a
| copper smelting site of 500 BC would be interesting:
| consider the Moche, in Peru, who independently had a sort
| of bronze age around that time while Europe was into iron.
| (I don 't think they did anything much with their bronze
| because they were too preoccupied with body fluids and
| erotic pottery.)
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Ancient Egypt began to use iron objects centuries before
| most of Europe, the metal was still rare and prized
|
| Tutankhamun's dagger, for example, was crafted from iron
| and was probably a diplomatic gift from Mitanni (modern
| day Syria/Turkey)
|
| Way before your Roman Empire
| card_zero wrote:
| Extremely rare meteoric iron, yes. So, not a historically
| significant iron age. Neat and all, but not a big
| cultural upheaval, making one dagger.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| >Way before your Roman Empire
|
| Lmao the one-sided cucumber measuring going on in this
| whole comment chain.
|
| Like one whole side is interested in talking about the
| origins of certain _types_ of metalworking and the other
| is more interested in chest-beating about the
| technicalities of who did it first.
| noduerme wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what was their deal with their
| precious bodily fluids? Some Dr Strangelove type
| paranoia? Or just a usual Friday at a swingers club?
| card_zero wrote:
| It was all about the irrigation, apparently. It's vital
| to keep life-giving fluids in your irrigation canal, and
| by extension also in your body, otherwise you're a loser.
| Something along those lines.
| lukan wrote:
| "they just had a theory that copper processing lead to
| discoveries in iron processing."
|
| Is there any theory how it could have been any different?
|
| It sounds obvious, that advances in metal working comes from
| those working with metals and not from carpet makers.
| card_zero wrote:
| They found ancient inhabitants of Georgia using iron ore as
| flux for copper smelting, so it's a theory of _how_ they
| went from one to the other. It 's not terribly exciting but
| it beats "they tried smelting rocks at random to see if
| anything good would happen".
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Smelting random rocks (with fairly distinct appearances)
| sounds like a very logical thing to do. I would say it's
| a natural human impulse to experiment with random stuff
| and see what happens, that's curiosity.
|
| What sound highly improbable is someone having access to
| this obviously different ore (used as a flux) but never
| thinking of smelting it.
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| i have zero background in this topic.. but if i were to
| guess there are >100x more ceramic kilns than there are
| bronze smelters
|
| if some people chucked random ores into ceramic kilns,
| maybe one would get out some iron slag and then iterate
| from there
|
| theres a great blog series about making iron.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-
| they-...
|
| its easy on paper, but when you get into the details its
| actually tricky
| dboreham wrote:
| Having been a kid living in a place that had open fires
| burning (new houses were under construction and the
| builders often made fires to get rid of scrap materials),
| I can say that the desire in the primitive mind to throw
| random things into a roaring fire to see what happens, is
| strong.
| teleforce wrote:
| Fun fact, in the Quran prophet David (Dawwud) was granted a
| miracle that he can shape and mould iron easily, perhaps for
| building weaponary and armor.
|
| Another fun fact, there's a surah or chapter name iron (Al-
| Hadiid) in the Quran [2].
|
| [1] Quran 34:10:
|
| https://quran.com/saba/10
|
| Indeed, We granted David a (great) privilege from Us,
| (commanding:) "O mountains! Echo his hymns! And the birds as
| well." We made iron mouldable for him.
|
| [2] Surah Al-Hadiid (Quran 57):
|
| https://quran.com/al-hadid
| rajamaka wrote:
| Not sure I see the relevance
| peterfirefly wrote:
| "We waz smiths", I think.
| jmpeax wrote:
| The tech tree of future games will have us smelt copper to unlock
| iron.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| RuneScape has it right the first time.
| atwrk wrote:
| Already implemented in the Civilization series since the very
| first one, "Sid Meier's Civilization" from 1991 :)
| _joel wrote:
| Watched a good video on "The Old Copper Culture", apparently they
| were using and working copper 9000 years ago, due to massive
| natural deposits of pure copper, something I never knew.
| (interesting geological reasons too) - worth a watch
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf7cKSFCeag
| INTPenis wrote:
| It's kinda romantic to think that innovation in those days likely
| came from the industrial sites. Maybe it was perfected later by
| an aristocrat, but it was more likely to be discovered by the
| ones who had ready access to smelters and were already using them
| all day every day.
| XorNot wrote:
| Also the economic situation it implies: industrial sites with
| specialists who were heavily engaged in one type of industry,
| such that they had the chance to notice and develop these sorts
| of innovations and discoveries.
| noduerme wrote:
| Go into any restaurant kitchen. You can see in realtime how -
| half by pure superstition - humans can adopt totally
| unexplained, unscientific, but highly refined procedures and
| ingredients that enhance some particular effect in the thing
| they're working on. It just takes an archaeologist to find
| the science behind the cooking.
| OJFord wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a book (I'm imagining sort of 'coffee table'
| style picture book, but not necessarily) on technological
| advancements through human history, ideally roughly
| chronologically but more organised around what needed to happen
| before the next was possible?
| arethuza wrote:
| Well, there is "The Book - The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding
| Civilization" - I don't have a copy but it certainly looks
| interesting:
|
| https://howtorebuildcivilization.com/en-gb
| massenpunkt wrote:
| I started reading Josephine Quinn's book "How the world made
| the west" and I can recommend it. It goes quite into detail and
| is not of the sort "coffee-table"-style picture book. It
| explains the origins of technologies, trade between groups and
| challenges the common view how civilizations evolved.
| fennecfoxy wrote:
| Based on the title it sounds like the intentions of the
| author were more politically motivated than anything else.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Based on reading the Guardian review (that predictably
| praises it and seems to be written by someone who doesn't
| know much history) and a much better review on a website
| run, weirdly enough, by Christians (written by someone who
| does know history), I would agree.
|
| The first half of the quality review praises the good parts
| of the book, the second half is where the meat is.
|
| It is probably a useful book if you don't know much about
| the classical world but it doesn't seem like one should
| take one's politics from it.
|
| Quality review:
|
| https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/how-world-made-
| we...
|
| Low quality review:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/28/how-the-
| world-...
| kristianp wrote:
| The author is a professor of ancient history at Oxford
| University. What makes you think it is political? A book
| can specialise in Western history without having a hidden
| agenda.
| frostburg wrote:
| A history of technology, edited by Singer, several volumes and
| many authors. It's old historiographically (from the Fifties)
| but very detailed and comprehensive; I have a recent Italian
| paperback edition but you should be able to find it in English
| easily enough. Lots of fascinating details.
|
| I'll see if I can come up with something with more up to date
| scholarship / better pictures (the work above is effectively
| but simply illustrated).
| WillAdams wrote:
| A broad overview, and kid-friendly, there is:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6314442-robert-crowther-...
| which is just what it says on the cover --- a tour through a
| house showing when things were invented.
|
| A lot more focused there is:
| https://goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectionists
| (but it's a rather dry text and quite periodic and focused on
| specific technologies)
|
| Perhaps:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48815394-1-000-invention...
|
| There's a site which has come up here a couple of times along
| these lines which I'm not finding, but Britannica has:
|
| https://www.britannica.com/story/history-of-technology-timel...
| whycome wrote:
| James Burke should write the book to accompany his
| "Connections" tv show.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| He did:
|
| <https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=9780333248270>
| dredmorbius wrote:
| James Burke's _Connections_ (companion to his 1978 television
| series of the same name) does this in fair part, though it
| tracks a number of distinct (and somewhat idiosyncratic) paths
| through time.
|
| <https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=9780333248270>
|
| There's Joseph Needham's _Science and Civilisation in China_
| though that 's not exactly a coffee-table book. It's staggering
| in its own way, however:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch..
| .>
| metalman wrote:
| poor speculation
|
| there are multiple plausible pathways for the dicovery of iron
| and other metals, the most prominent bieng through the extreamly
| ancient discovery of porcelain, and baked pottery indipendently
| at numerous sites world wide, and there are many types of
| ores(rocks,dirt) and fluxes, such as sand,or salt...the list is
| impossibly long. It is always good to keep in mind that basic
| technological developments predate our species,the key technology
| is of course, fire. I have been instructed in various methods of
| exploiting the properties of fire and natural materials to achive
| a wide range results including smelting ore to getting durable
| finnishes and experimentation in the hardening of copper. Many
| people are out there right now,working with found materials and
| producing metals and other peoducts in startlingly large
| quantities useing purely ancient manual methods. Current state of
| the art metalurgical operations are optimised in ways that go way
| beyond anything imaginable to the casual observer and exploit
| exotic phenomina that is counterintuitive and invisible to the
| naked eye.
| cpursley wrote:
| This is an interesting book on the general area:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Can anyone explain iron - unless it is steel (which was not a
| common knowledge trough history) it is worse than bronze in every
| aspect. So what lead to the iron age?
| noduerme wrote:
| Anemia? Also, the earth made way more sense when it was flat.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Tin was hard to come by in those days and necessary for bronze.
| Late bronze age led to civilizational collapse and trade
| networks that distributed tin broke down. Iron was more
| abundant and could be more useful by itself than copper alone.
| May have been used for farm implements at first.
| arnsholt wrote:
| To expand on "tin was hard to come by", I believe two major
| sources of tin have been identified for bronze used in the
| Fertile Crescent: one in Cornwall, and one in Afghanistan.
| They had to travel _really far_ abroad to make this stuff.
| bluGill wrote:
| The early processes for smelting iron resulted in a little
| steel which would be easy to collect and save for one big work.
| Over thousands of years you learn more and more of how to
| 'encourage this'
| aidenn0 wrote:
| 1. Once you know how to make a hot enough furnace, iron is
| cheaper to make than bronze. Instead of finding copper and tin
| ore separately, you just need red rocks and a whole lot of
| trees. Quantity can trump quality.
|
| 2. There was steel in use already prior to 1000BC. High Carbon
| steel was being produced in both Europe and Asia by 400 BC.
| When people say "the iron age" it includes the usage of steel
| (which is mostly iron).
| tstrimple wrote:
| And there are drastically more red rocks than green ones
| available. Iron makes up something like 5% of the earth's
| crust. Copper is around 0.006%. On parts of the earth you
| could just pick up chunks of iron from bogs. It was literally
| just lying around.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Transportation costs used to be huge.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _These discoveries give weight to a long-discussed theory that
| iron was invented by copper smelters._
|
| Not to be flippant but who else could reasonably be expected to
| have invented it? Or is the implication that there were
| metalworkers at the time who weren't also copper smelters?
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| Right?
|
| "Early metallurgists found to have been experimenting with the
| properties of metals and ores, laying the foundation for future
| advances that would prove economically and technologically
| important" is not the biggest possible reveal.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not dismissing the research, which seems to
| be more about _how_ they discovered it. I can understand if
| that was /is an open question, and these possible answers are
| pretty interesting. I was just wondering if there were
| competing theories here with reasons to doubt one is more
| likely than the other.
| hluska wrote:
| Many years ago, my roommate was working on his PhD in
| geology while my history obsession was in full bloom and we
| talked about this a little. He made some interesting points
| about iron versus copper supply and how its relative
| abundance meant that some cultures would have had access to
| iron long before access to copper.
|
| The transition to iron was very slow and some places kept
| using bronze for centuries. There's also no single point
| (known) for where the Iron Age started. In Nigeria, for
| example, it seems most likely that Nok people worked with
| iron first and had no significant Copper or Bronze Age.
|
| I think that the closest answer is that we don't know for
| sure, but evidence seems to show that the path to iron
| followed different paths in different parts of the world.
| In some cases, the copper industry would have been heavily
| involved. In other places, an iron industry seemed to take
| shape before a copper industry, so the developments would
| have been independent.
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