Eli5 why is aluminium not used as a material until relatively recently whilst others metals like gold, iron, bronze, tin are found throughout human history?
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Aluminium oxidizes extremely easy. And it will stay oxidized unless you do dramatic things to it. Your other examples are much easier to refine. Gold does not normally oxidize so you can just pick it up from the ground. Tin and copper (bronze) can be refined just by heating it in an oxygen poor environment, such as a camp fire. Iron requires somewhat more heat and needs to react with coal to form pure iron from iron oxide but even this is relatively easy. However aluminium can not be refined in this way at all. Even today we can not refine aluminium this way. Aluminium is refined using electrolysis which requires huge electric power plants nearby. So we needed to find up electricity before we could start mass producing aluminium.
We did however use aluminium oxide for various things before we used the metal. It is an excellent abrasive which is used in for example sand paper. So we did mine aluminium and there are actually some very cool advancements in chemically separating ores which were first invented for aluminium. And there are actually a couple of extremely rare aluminium artifacts from the middle ages which we do not know how were made. But the rarity of them suggest that it was not something done at any large scale, each item was likely the lifes work of several people.
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