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?
In: 2489
I read somewhere a theory that the bronze age did not necessarily precede the iron age, but that both technologies overlapped and were developed at different rates in different places. The iron artefacts were less likely to survive.
Examples: Tutankhamun (bronze age king) had a meteorite iron dagger in his burial goods & the Inuit (no bronze) had iron tools made from meteorite boulders that Peary later nicked.
Besides that, the working methods are very different. Bronze, melt & pour.
Iron, heat white hot, batter the bloom to remove slag. Repeat, repeat, repeat, to make wrought iron. Crucible steel came much later. They weren’t melting iron until much later.
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