If early humans crafted a hammer or an axe from metal for example. How on earth did they craft the first tool that was used to create that hammer or axe. I know you can create a hammer from natural material like stone and an axe from a sharp piece of stone but how did they forge the first metal tools and even weapons?
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For a long time people had stone tools. Stone tools were strong and lasted a long time. But stone tools are hard to make. Imagine finding a hard rock and then grinding it with other rocks to shape it into a tool. Try it: ask your parents for two rocks to grind together. What does it do when you grind the rocks together? Think about how much work it would make to make a tool by grinding hard rocks that way.
People would sometimes find lumps of copper and iron in the ground. They learned that they could use their stone tools to beat those lumps into tools. This was easier than grinding rocks. For a while people used both stone and metal tools, mostly because it wasn’t that often you found a lump of metal just sitting there.
Then people found metal in special rocks in the ground. They learned you can heat those rocks in a very hot fire to get the metal out. You can get a lot of metal from those rocks. Now people started making many more metal tools. They didn’t need stone tools anymore.
One really neat fact: Some of the iron lumps that people found came from space. These lumps swooshed in from space, fell to ground and were later found by people. So people started making iron tools by pounding on space rocks!
Edit: Removed a supposition that is probably true but not not needed. Simplified the language a little more.
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