Metal is essential in our world but how did early humans noticed that that shiny “rock” is usefull
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Some metals are usable/forgeable in their natural state, like copper. They’d make better tools than say a stone hand axe.
Metallic copper can be found as is, as can gold and some others
Other metals can be refined from their ores with intense heat. Tin and lead are very easy to melt, and we can combine them with other metals to get bronze and peuter.
It was just kind of trial and error, but once you find the right rocks, you can replicate the process with similar looking rocks.
When we get to iron, that’s when metallurgy really took off. It takes much more heat to melt iron than it does copper, lead, or tin, some needed to find how to make a hotter fire first. Bellows had existed for some time, but you need a lot of air flow to get a wood fire hot enough to melt iron. Coal would help immensely in getting fires that hot
Aluminum was an incredibly hard metal to make, despite being the most common metal in the Earth’s crust. The Washington Monument is capped with aluminum, and Napolean had a set of aluminum silverware because it was so valuable. Once we harnessed electricity, we could refine aluminum through the Bayer process, making aluminum super cheap.
Copper and tin are both found easily. Especially thousands of years ago. And they are relative soft and easy to smelt out of rock.
Combine them and you get bronze.
It took a long time for people to figure out iron working which is much more difficult. Thus why we distinguish Bronze Age versus Iron Age.
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Copper and Tin ores are very common and importantly they melt at a low temperature.
Not low enough for an average camp fire, but low enough that you could melt them with a very hot wood fire.
We don’t know how and when humans discovered the first metals but the oldest examples of metal tools date back to circa 9000 BC
It’s likely that it was an accident. Krug put shiny rock in fire and it melted.
He then put 2 and 2 together and figured out how to make the first castings.
After that it was a question of finding different kinds of shiny rocks and seeing if those melted too.
A teacher of mine once proposed a hypothetical scenario where cavemen noticed that after making a camp fire, there would be small pools of solidified copper coming out of stones on the ground. Then they figured it out from there.
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Imagine you live in the Stone Age. After a rainy night, you come out of your shelter and notice this puddle of brown mud. It is a sunny day and you are going to do some hunting. When you get back, you notice that the brown mud has become hard and you realize that when wet you can mold it to any shape and then let it dry in the sun for it to harden. Congratulations, you discovered how to use clay.
Soon you realize you can speed the process using fire to harden the clay.
One faithful day, you are admiring the last piece of clay you created and notice something different, like a line with a different colour embedded in the clay and it seems harder. You just discovered a trace of copper.
From there, it doesn’t take you long to figure out how to look for traces of copper in clay and/or dirt in general. You start a process of trial and error to separate the traces of copper from the dirt, and from there you start experimenting with other traces in the dirt/clay/rock and start a process of trial and error to mix the traces. The dawn of metallurgy has begun.
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