Basically what the title says, how did people first figure out that metal would be useful, how to work it, etc, if metal is buried under the ground and requires a substantial effort to extract?
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Metals are not necessarily deep underground. Raw metallic copper existed in surface deposits. Copper and more so iron ores exist on the surface. Pretty much any red rocks probably have some iron content. Red clay does too.
At some point, rocks must have been cooked in a reducing environment like a charcoal furnace, and produced useful metal.
Because not all metal is buried under the ground and requires a substantial effort to extract. Plenty of metal ores can be found above ground. Gold is thought to have been the first metal worked, since it can be found and worked in its pure form. It wouldn’t take much effort to recognize that some types of rocks, when heated, would produce other metals that can also be worked.
Not all metal deposits are buried deep underground, just most of them. It’s entirely possible for ores or even raw metals to be found at the surface level in exposed rock formations. We dig deep to obtain metal ores in the modern day because our demand for metals dwarfs that of primitive societies, and because we exhausted all the large easily-accessible surface-level metal deposits long ago.
You know how in minecraft sometimes weird blocks like iron are outside? People played around with those metals and realized some were tougher than others when they used fire on them. And they kept playing around and told everyone else what worked and what didnt.
This is an exceptional question!
I would assume the ancient’s first encounters with heavy metals would have been with natural river sluices.
Nuggets, pickers and small flakes of lead, gold and iron.
Store them in your leather canteen, accidentally smelt them one day.
Fast forward a few hundred years and your civilization should have realised that the same material is concentrated in veins.
I believe the best answers are on /r/history. From my memory, it started with pottery, with bits of copper being found after baking. This led to early copper smelting and eventually to bronze, the iron smelting built upon that.
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