How did ancient people first figure out metallurgy? Wouldn’t they have had to know to dig up the metals from deep underground in the first place?

Question

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?

In: 8

Answer 1

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.