Like i know you just melt it down and voila metal but like how did they know what rocks? What was the process surely you can’t just melt rocks and get iron, right? How did they know this rock has iron and that one has copper? I understand gold and gold panning did they just pan for copper or whatever metal they wanted that seems to inefficient?
In: Earth Science
It’s difficult to fathom just how long humans have existed. There has been more than enough time for humans to find some funny looking rocks, heat those rocks up whilst trying to do something else (perhaps a pottery kiln was made from the rocks), notice that the thing they melt into is pretty interesting, and then go out looking for more of that type of rock. Eventually, over quite a lot of trial and error, these civilisations figure out what they need to be looking for that indicates metal ore. When they find a good deposit of it, they set up a settlement there so it’s easy to access. Metal ores tend to be found next to other instances of the same ore due to the way geology works, so once you’ve found one coppery rock you aren’t going to have that much difficulty finding more of it.
Also, yes, getting metal ore was a very inefficient process. Then once you’ve got your copper, you’ve got to find some tin to mix it with, and tin is pretty rare. The first bronze-age civilisations in the Mediterranean (The Egyptians, Greeks and Hittites) collapsed into a dark age when migrations disrupted the fragile trade routes they used for tin. It took hundreds of years to recover. Making bronze was difficult and expensive. The key benefit of the discovery of iron was just that it was a hell of a lot easier to produce. Finally you could equip a decent-sized army with weapons and kill even more people.
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