I would have thought that with bronze being an alloy it would have been more difficult to work with than iron, so why was it the first to become widely used?
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One thing you have to understand is the lengths of time we’re talking about here. The Stone Age lasted over a million years, while humans gathered information excruciatingly slowly, and began to spread it amongst themselves. At some point during that tremendous amount of time, humans must have thrown some rocks into their fireplaces, whether it have been to warm them up to then throw into soups to keep them hot longer, or to potentially cover the flames and create hot coals for ritual purposes.
Regardless, eventually they found that certain rocks would leave hard “puddles” of a different, more easily shapeable “rock.” They took notice of how this could be useful, as currently their tools all relied on finding stones of the right shape and then laboriously shaping them down, and began to experiment with it. By the onset of the Bronze Age, we had more or less completely figured out how to determine which rocks would produce a puddle and how to get the most puddle out of any given rock. We also figured out what the puddles could be useful for once they hardened in certain shapes and were filed down like they used to do with their stone tools.
However, to get to Bronze from simple metals like copper or tin, obviously you need to make an alloy. How did that happen? Well, it was already clear that most liquids could be mixed, and by now, we noticed the puddles were liquid. Maybe a tool-maker used two different kinds of ores due to not having enough of one for his needs. Maybe it was part of a deliberate experimental process to figure out how to maximise efficiency of toolmaking. Maybe someone wanted to see what would happen if you mixed something into the puddle, like that weird red gem-looking dust you got while digging (arsenic-sulphur), and let it harden? Regardless of the process, you end up with this new puddle which seems harder and stronger than either of your old puddles. With a little more tweaking to find the best ratio of materials, you finally make Bronze, becoming the greatest toolmaker in the world overnight. This obviously doesn’t last, as this occurs all over the place, especially once people realise it’s possible.
However, this whole time, many metallic rocks were being thrown aside as they couldn’t be melted with the current temperature flame. Maybe later on, when people were trying to ~~improve~~work around bronze, they realised that iron was still harder than ~~bronze~~copper was, so they focused on finding ways to make it workable. Maybe they were already improving how hot their flames were, and began to notice that it was possible to work with more metals when they had hotter flames, and the finding was a coincidence. Another theory suggests that iron arsenide was deliberately made as a copper smelting byproduct so that the arsenic could be recycled into bronze, and blacksmiths experimented with the leftover iron slag. Regardless, without working with copper and bronze as extensively as they had, there would have been no reason for them master fire to such an extent, which made working iron possible in the first place. Going through the Bronze Age and completely mastering low-melting-point metals over a couple thousand years was essential for entering the Iron Age and working with harder, higher melting-point metals.
Stone Age lasted over a million years. Bronze Age lasted over 2000 years. Iron Age was not even 1000 years. Each era is a natural evolution of the previous era due to making use of the best technology available at the time.
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