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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The first metal worked by humans was copper. Copper is quite soft as metals go, can be found (or rather, could in ancient times be found) in its pure metallic form on the surface of the Earth, and can be worked with stone tools with effort. It’s difficult and labor-intensive, but it’ll get you a metal tool with a lot of work.
Later on, they figured out how to forge metal using kilns, which were built from brick and ceramic. Even a primitive brick kiln can get up to 1000 C or so, which is more than enough to melt tin (melting point ~400 C) and very close to enough to fully melt copper (melting point 1085 C); a hot kiln could melt copper (in a stone vessel), mix the two metals together, and then pour the resulting mixture into a cast to form bronze. But this was later on; copper was used for a long time before bronze was discovered.
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