Metal is essential in our world but how did early humans noticed that that shiny “rock” is usefull
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ELI5: You’ve seen popcorn seeds right? Who would ever want to eat those yuck! But if you heat them up, they turn inside out and they they super yummy! If you heat something up you’re not “supposed” to it can have surprising and sometimes delicious results. Always ask your Mom or Dad if you want to heat something up first!
Non ELI5: Basically by accident. Just like 200 years ago humans really had no concept for “oil” being useful, it’d just be this gross stuff that was around. There were legit veins of copper ore on the surface of the earth. i.e. a mine with no digging. It was just “around”
So you’d be putting together rocks to make a nice fire pit, run the fire pit all night like you do, then in the process of going through the ash notice “hey, there’s this weird… shiny almost like dried blood, kinda stiff object”
Just inadvertently smelted some copper in the process of a normal fire.
Which would undoubtably been a novelty amongst cavemen. Then it turned into a quest to find/identify the types of rocks that would have more of the shiny stuff in it, then get the temperature right, then you can start smelting.
Someone messing around with it probably learned it kept a sharpened edge pretty well, and they started messing with creating molds using rock.
Now instead of all day crafting a stone/bone arrowhead… you could cast a bunch of copper ones that would be quicker and more durable.
Think of it like going to the store and you could buy a nice pint glass to drink beer for $15 or a 100 Solo plastic cups for the same price.
It’s kind of the same dynamics.
Humans found natural metals like copper lying about and learned how to shape it. As the amount of easily workable copper became harder to find, humans figured out they could heat up rocks with small amounts of copper in them to get the copper out. In the process other metals would melt to and mix in, sometimes resulting in “better” metal. Because metal became so important to society, humans figured this out and learned how to create alloys intentionally.
In the Americas copper was more common and there was les competition for it. It’s been theorized the lack of competition for metal is why the native Americans never figured out smelting.
Look at this shiny rock. I’m a human and will throw it into the fire because… Why not? Oh, it melts. Oh, it hardened again. I wonder if I shape it while it’s molten …
Also, since the topic of both metal and primitive humanity came up, I feel compelled to share some [caveman metal](https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=b3CIjUaTUxw) because… Why not?
Chunks of almost pure copper used to just be found lying on the ground, and could be hammered into tools and weapons. Chunks of iron or steel from meteorites too. That was an early part of it. Of course that stuff has been pretty well all scavenged all over the world. Once clay pots and ovens to fire them were invented, smelting metal was discovered as a spinoff benefit
Someone probably made a big hot campfire on some kind of metal ore rich earth and when it was done and cooled down they noticed a crude metal like hard substance in the ashes and concluded that if they subject more of thay earth to heat they can get more of it and make useful things with it.
Power chords, humbucker pickups, screaming tube amps and distortion pedals. It happened around the 9000 BCE mark, with the use of the first copper guitars (hence the name “electric”).
Just kidding in the first and last part. Trial and error with native (naturally occurring) metals, probably, like copper, silver, gold, tin, and meteoric iron.
Metal-working led to another happy accident: glass was probably discovered as an accidental by-product of smelting.
Iron pyrite can form large square crystals, I’m sure someone somewhere used one to hack, smash or grind something because it’s harder than most anything else they had access to at the time.
They discovered metal smelting most likely when people were firing pottery and some kind of ore with a low melting point was added to the clay or just happened to be in the oven.
From then on, it was trial and error
Sweetie, we’re cave men. We find refuge in caves and start fires to stay warm, ward off predators, and cook our food so we don’t get belly worms. At some point a while back, we noticed that if we started a fire next to particular types of shiny rock in that cave over there, the rock would melt like ice when winter ends. But as soon as the fire was out, the rock went back to being a shiny rock again. Wild stuff.
Your crazy uncle had this wild idea to shape that liquid rock into something sharp and let it cook like that and then use it as a weapon, but then he ate a random mushroom and died, so I dunno if we’re going to trying any of his crazy ideas. But hey, maybe one day you’ll try it out and see if it works.
I doubt it was even that humans ‘discovered metal’ these things are taking place over a long period of time by a great many experimental people. Knowledge was just forged and passed down slowly over a long time.
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