Metal is essential in our world but how did early humans noticed that that shiny “rock” is usefull
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We’ve been using fire to some degree for millions of years. Mercury, tin, and lead ores will release metal in campfires, and once people start to use rocks either to line fire pits or as a heat tool, someone was bound to notice when the rocks at hand were ore. Possibly it was noticed several times without an enduring metallurgic technology taking hold. Once you have the notion that interesting substances can come out of hot rocks, trial and error can take over.
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Everyone in the comments is talking about how copper would accidentally melt in the fire pit.
In reality, copper melts at 2000F, and a wood bonfire only gets as hot as about 1100F without a strong draft.
It does become malleable though. I’d imagine that this is how people initially started using it – heating it, then making ornaments, jewelry, etc out of it.
They would have already been familiar with using fire to process other materials at that point – they would use fire to harden wood and make it rot resistant. They would also heat clay when making pottery.
Like many developments in human history, probably warfare. Back when we just figured out how to sharpen rocks into spear tips, some enterprising young human in his shed hut thought, “I need to find the best rocks to make the best pointy bits”. Multiply that by a thousand and eventually you’ll get one human who thought maybe rocks would do more damage if they’re hot, and thus exposes their stone tips to heat. One day they actually manage to melt one of the rocks, but when it was cool it was actually harder than the rock before. This rock may have been a soft metal, like copper or tin, but thay more or less Jumpstart the arms race: some rocks when melted can be shaped into pointer sticks.
How instead of rock spears, which can still chip and dull quickly, you have copper spears which stay sharper longer. Once you know so.e rocks can melt, you try to melt other rocks and see what rocks melt well together. I bet most ancient metals weren’t pure copper but dirty alloys of materials like zinc and Nickle, and some people noticed this. Indeed, one of our oldest written historic records is about someone selling subpar copper, so at some point people did understand the importance of melting the right rocks.
Likely by accident; possibly by finding globs of crudely smelted copper/tin/lead in the ashes of large bonfires.
Copper is a very nice upgrade from stone for many applications, because it’s basically shatter proof, and it can be beaten back into shape once deformed. Only time it’s not an upgrade is precision slicing implements where sharpness is more important than sturdiness.
So the story was probably something along the lines of
1. Celebrate a successful hunt with a big bonfire.
2. Find globs of ‘stuff’ that weren’t there before while collecting ashes.
3. Try using it for tools and coming to like it (hurts hands less than stone tools)
4. Try recreating it, and discovering where it came from
5. Start experimenting on different rocks, badabing badaboom, ya got metallurgy.
Wasn’t the first copper cold hammered or something? Like they would just beat down on the ore until something happened? Before they discovered smelting?
a fallen angel named azazel taught humans the various arts of civilization, such as metallurgy, cosmetics, astrology, and magic.
Tony Iommi lost some of his fingertips during an accident at work. To still make music he made wax fingertips and tuned down his guitar to loosen the snares which produced a lower and heavier sound in the process. This would become the signature sound of Black Sabbath, broadly known as the first metal band.
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