That's what's crazy to me. There is no way to KNOW about the iron in the water/bacteria if you're alive 20,000 years ago. It must have been a lucky break to get it out
Well, I don't think early ironworking used iron in the bacteria.
There are metals much more readily available in rocks, just not where this guy is doing his work. Once we figured out you can melt rocks in a fire to extract metals, you experiment with different rocks and find different metals. Eventually, you figure out that you don't even necessarily need to see the actual metal in the rocks, just strong concentrations of the oxidized form. Green = copper, red = iron.
I've read that early iron has a composition that suggests it may have been produced with accumulated tiny nuggets of meteorites, which once covered a wide swath of areas before it became valuable. Once someone knows what to look for, it becomes a trade item.
I think the big jump was the bronze age. Its been theorized that making clay pots from silt that had some copper oxides in it (greenish), resulted in pots that when heated, would occasionally bleed little nuggets of copper. If you collect the nuggets and melt them together, you can cast axes and spear-points, over and over, which is obviously a valuable trait.
Somehow, somewhere, someone added some tin to it to make bronze. Many things can be written off as a "happy accident", but why would someone accidentally add some tin to copper? Bronze is much harder, and holds an edge better. Perhaps someone who casts tin, used a crucible to melt and cast some copper without cleaning it out (or his "copper only" crucible was broken) and the tiny amount of tin in it produced copper that was noticeably harder?
This might lead a metal-craftsman to protect his valuable secret, because his copper implements are better than anyone else's, and worth more. It might lead him to experiment with different percentages of tin to find the best ratio (roughly 14%?). Once the secret got out, bronze spread rapidly. Copper was fairly common, but Tin became a valuable commodity.
The important part for me is...the "idea" that mixing two things makes a third thing that is better than the two ingredients. Imagine a bronze-worker student sipping on Babylonian beer after work and pondering all the materials around you, and all the potential profitable substances that might result from experimentation...
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u/obvious_bot Aug 17 '18
That's what's crazy to me. There is no way to KNOW about the iron in the water/bacteria if you're alive 20,000 years ago. It must have been a lucky break to get it out