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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They made things incrementally, so I make x, then y then z. Y is harder than x, z is better than y. Human progression is incremental: this metal is slightly harder than that, especially if one mixes these two metals. Bang: next thing one has an alloy whereof the correct mixtures were found from Trail and Error.
Interesting little fact, they found a cache of 293 bronze halbreds in germany dating to around 2,000 BC. Some of the metals they used to make them came from the area of Stonehenge.
Remember that casting doesn’t necessarily require metal tools. Forging and hammering and more does require them. Those more advanced methods developed hundreds and thousands of years later.
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There’s a great YouTube series on this called primitive technology. Very entertaining. Basically in some kinds of soil there’s small amounts of metal. You build a wood furnace from mud and get it hot enough to melt the iron out of the soil. You collect all the metal bits, melt them into one and then you can make tools and weapons from them
The earliest metals were really malleable. They could be forged by using rock. Then, they’d create weapons not by force, but by heat. Melt the copper/tin/etc and create bronze. Just as an example.
Well first you put clay in a fire. Notice that the clay got hard after the fire was out.
Then someone starts making pots out of clay because tempered clay won’t dissolve in water and is much more malleable when it’s wet clay than wood.
Then someone realizes that making a furnace out of clay will make the tempering process much more efficient costing less wood to make more pots.
Then someone notices that the pots get even better if you first make charcoal out of the wood because the temperature can get even higher.
Then someone puts red clay in the super hot furnace that gets so hot that the rust literally turns back into iron. When they are done they notice these small hard pebbles.
Someone decides to collect a bunch of hard metal pebbles and put them all in a furnace. Those pebbles melt together and become a tiny ingot.
Then someone notices these ingots are malleable when super hot. They work on getting the temperature hot enough that the ingot glow and then starts shaping them.
Eventually, someone shapes it into an axe and that’s how you get an axe.
This is way simplified and in reality, the bronze age came before the iron age but it’s how it could have happened I think. (I’m no metallurgist or historian so I’m not qualified to actually answer this question).
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So…fun fact: a hammer is one of the easiest tools to make in that you take a rock of the right shape and affix it to a stick (with rope or leather) and there you have a hammer. If you happen to have copper or iron as the rock that you picked up (and back when thos was going on, that was a thing that could happen), you had a (very crude) metal hammer.
“Forging” could be done over a campfire, if it was hot enough (at least in the very beginning with copper). The more advanced the metal, the hotter the fire, of course
Something not explicitly mentioned yet is also that you can just use a wooden or stone hammer to work metal, especially softer ones such as copper. If one absolutely needs to, one could even do steel that way. Rocks are damn hard and can with some effort be put into shapes and sharpened, while wood is good for blunt things and handles.
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