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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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.
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.
You dig up a chunk of raw copper and hit it with a rock until it’s in the shape of a hammer. Then you use your copper hammer to make more copper tools.
This makes me realize how difficult it is to rebuild civilization without all the cumulated knowledge mankind built over millennia.
From memory if you have 2 Bronze Age buildings, 1200 Gold and 2000 Food you can advance to the Iron Age and then you can make stuff out of iron.
To understand how the process works and Experience it.
You can try playing this game called ” Factorio”
It’s really fun and you learn a lot in the game.
Fire first, it all starts with fire (which is why no underwater civilizations).
Fire melts things, those things get poured into shapes in stone, then other stone is used to sharpen or bend metal.
Everything evolves from the prior.
Cast a rough shape and then rub it against a hard stone to get the final shape/sharpness. You can theoretically even hammer forge using stones, after all metal heated up gets much softer and pliable.
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I’ve seen someone do it by extracting iron from limestone, then melting that iron in a mud furnace and pouring it into clay moulds. Or something along those lines.
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