> 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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
Honesty I know a bunch of people who are burntout climbers and burntout geologists - sounds like a blast. Fun mineralogy with climbing that’s not…super exotic but still fun? I’d pay for it.
Some of those climbs are dangerous though. The Chambless Skarn has a vertical wall of solid epidote you have to scale to reach a massive pocket of world-class hedenbergite, at the top of the mountain. That wall is a few stories tall, and your only grip is the side walls of the rock around you.
> 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 :)
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, Cornwall was most famous for its tin, but there was a reasonable amount of copper too - particularly in the Carnon and Tamar valleys.
There were also very productive copper mines around Great Orme in North Wales, which would have only been a couple of days' travel by boat and were frequently visited as part of the same Atlantic Bronze Age trade routes as Cornish tin.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
"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.
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.
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.
Interesting, thank you! I would have expected the higher melting point of iron to be a big hindrance compared to copper (and other metals), but hadn't considered the possibility of copper just not being locally present for some ancient cultures.
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
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'
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).
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.
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.
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.
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".
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..
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".
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.
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.
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].
> 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.)
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
> Amazing hematite crystals mixed with copper with strong assay signs of gold underneath.
Any chance we HN rockhounds could get some specimens? 8-)
"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?
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
Honesty I know a bunch of people who are burntout climbers and burntout geologists - sounds like a blast. Fun mineralogy with climbing that’s not…super exotic but still fun? I’d pay for it.
Some of those climbs are dangerous though. The Chambless Skarn has a vertical wall of solid epidote you have to scale to reach a massive pocket of world-class hedenbergite, at the top of the mountain. That wall is a few stories tall, and your only grip is the side walls of the rock around you.
> 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 :)
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
Good point!
> 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.
Yeah, Cornwall was most famous for its tin, but there was a reasonable amount of copper too - particularly in the Carnon and Tamar valleys.
There were also very productive copper mines around Great Orme in North Wales, which would have only been a couple of days' travel by boat and were frequently visited as part of the same Atlantic Bronze Age trade routes as Cornish tin.
> 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.
>We also know that different populations have different distributions -- slightly different standard deviations, sometimes vastly different means.
Citation needed. This is at a minimum, highly controversial.
And I think the claim is that the distribution was more or less the same, not that they were all uniformly intelligent.
No citation needed -- from me, anyway. It's only controversial because one side lies.
On one side there are the phlebotomists, the geocentrists, the astrologers, the religious.
On the other side there is science.
> 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...
"That old Copper++ is worthless, you need to try this Rust"
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.
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.
Or, being static was not even adaptive, but was just a dearth of good ideas (ideas about ideas) that arose later.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
Interesting, thank you! I would have expected the higher melting point of iron to be a big hindrance compared to copper (and other metals), but hadn't considered the possibility of copper just not being locally present for some ancient cultures.
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
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?
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
I have it. Its not scientific - just a collection of nice illustrations.
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...
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).
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.
Based on the title it sounds like the intentions of the author were more politically motivated than anything else.
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-...
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.
Lots of professors have political agendas, especially in the humanities.
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...>
Not an exact match, but I liked this one a lot (read it twice):
"Faster, Better, Cheaper" in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond by Christoph Roser
James Burke should write the book to accompany his "Connections" tv show.
He did:
<https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=9780333248270>
The tech tree of future games will have us smelt copper to unlock iron.
Already implemented in the Civilization series since the very first one, "Sid Meier's Civilization" from 1991 :)
RuneScape has it right the first time.
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.
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.
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.
This is an interesting book on the general area:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
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?
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.
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.
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'
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).
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.
Anemia? Also, the earth made way more sense when it was flat.
Transportation costs used to be huge.
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.
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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
Not sure I see the relevance
"We waz smiths", I think.
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
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..
"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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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...
> 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.)
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?
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.
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
Extremely rare meteoric iron, yes. So, not a historically significant iron age. Neat and all, but not a big cultural upheaval, making one dagger.
>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.