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A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

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Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#71

Post by Terr_ »

GreenWatermelon wrote: post #39
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> Sparkly hematite mineral was used as a flux by copper smelters. Its distinctive appearance may have helped to attract attention from ancient miners and prospectors. Every once in a while I pull up some Wikipedia article with idle curiosity of "If I were transported back in time, could I usefully help this get invented?" One result of this is a helpless appreciation for how complicated it can be to even identify wha…

One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid. Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today. With regards to metals, I have no doubt someone, be it a kid apprentice or a master smelter, experimented with melting different rocks to see what comes out. After all, if you already know that different rocks spew out different metals (copper, tin, etc..) it…

> One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid.

Or in some cases, "poor, not stupid" [0], where even geniuses had no power or resources to pursue great innovations compared to the immediate priority of Not Starving.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#72

Post by tstrimple »

aidenn0 wrote: post #55
ReptileMan wrote: post #31

Can anyone explain iron - unless it is steel (which was not a common knowledge trough history) it is worse than bronze in every aspect. So what lead to the iron age?

1. Once you know how to make a hot enough furnace, iron is cheaper to make than bronze. Instead of finding copper and tin ore separately, you just need red rocks and a whole lot of trees. Quantity can trump quality. 2. There was steel in use already prior to 1000BC. High Carbon steel was being produced in both Europe and Asia by 400 BC. When people say "the iron age" it includes the usage of steel (which is mostly ir…

And there are drastically more red rocks than green ones available. Iron makes up something like 5% of the earth’s crust. Copper is around 0.006%. On parts of the earth you could just pick up chunks of iron from bogs. It was literally just lying around.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#73

Post by msds »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #59
lightedman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Amazing hematite crystals mixed with copper with strong assay signs of gold underneath." Did you actually assay out anomalous gold concentrations or are you seeing the sulfides and oxides that are associated with gold? If the former, what sort of concentration are you getting?

I have only assayed samples from the iron cap. You would not expect to find much in that part of the formation but it still came in at 1-2g/ton. There is a large area of visually striking bornite[0] that I have not yet been able to properly sample which is roughly the area you would expect the gold to concentrate. It is in the walls of a narrow, deep canyon at high elevation. The region was mined for gold/copper a ce…

Honesty I know a bunch of people who are burntout climbers and burntout geologists - sounds like a blast. Fun mineralogy with climbing that’s not…super exotic but still fun? I’d pay for it.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#74

Post by jay_kyburz »

arethuza wrote: post #21
OJFord wrote: post #18

Can anyone recommend a book (I'm imagining sort of 'coffee table' style picture book, but not necessarily) on technological advancements through human history, ideally roughly chronologically but more organised around what needed to happen before the next was possible?

Well, there is "The Book - The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization" - I don't have a copy but it certainly looks interesting: https://howtorebuildcivilization.com/en-gb

I have it. Its not scientific - just a collection of nice illustrations.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#75

Post by card_zero »

pixl97 wrote: post #53
card_zero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas improve over time. So people in the past have worse ideas. This might include fear of change, and some mythological notion of an eternal golden way of life, which you must dutifully maintain by spending a thousand years not inventing pottery, and if anybody dares to try it, beating them up.

The improvement of ideas over time is a rather complex process. It's multiple things working together. Typically you have to have an excess of calories which leads to free time in at least part of the population. While the 'fear of change' as gods fault is more of a post ad hoc rationalization of the horizon problem. That is any change in behaviors in the good times could lead to death in the hard times. Moving away…

Or, being static was not even adaptive, but was just a dearth of good ideas (ideas about ideas) that arose later.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#76

Post by leobg »

OJFord wrote: post #18

Can anyone recommend a book (I'm imagining sort of 'coffee table' style picture book, but not necessarily) on technological advancements through human history, ideally roughly chronologically but more organised around what needed to happen before the next was possible?

Not an exact match, but I liked this one a lot (read it twice):

"Faster, Better, Cheaper" in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond by Christoph Roser

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#77

Post by rcxdude »

peterfirefly wrote: post #64
GreenWatermelon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the axioms I go by is that people were never stupid. Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today. With regards to metals, I have no doubt someone, be it a kid apprentice or a master smelter, experimented with melting different rocks to see what comes out. After all, if you already know that different rocks spew out different metals (copper, tin, etc..) it…

> Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today. That sounds nice but axiomatic egalitarianism might, just might, not be empirically true. We know that there are vast differences in all modern uniform populations we have tested -- intelligence is normally distributed and the differences between the tails are huge. We also know that different populations have differ…

>We also know that different populations have different distributions -- slightly different standard deviations, sometimes vastly different means.

Citation needed. This is at a minimum, highly controversial.

And I think the claim is that the distribution was more or less the same, not that they were all uniformly intelligent.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#78

Post by peterfirefly »

rcxdude wrote: post #77
peterfirefly wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our ancestors 5000 and 10000 years ago were just as smart , intelligent and curios as we are today. That sounds nice but axiomatic egalitarianism might, just might, not be empirically true. We know that there are vast differences in all modern uniform populations we have tested -- intelligence is normally distributed and the differences between the tails are huge. We also know that different populations have differ…

>We also know that different populations have different distributions -- slightly different standard deviations, sometimes vastly different means. Citation needed. This is at a minimum, highly controversial. And I think the claim is that the distribution was more or less the same, not that they were all uniformly intelligent.

No citation needed -- from me, anyway. It's only controversial because one side lies.

On one side there are the phlebotomists, the geocentrists, the astrologers, the religious.

On the other side there is science.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#79

Post by peterfirefly »

kristianp wrote: post #70
fennecfoxy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the title it sounds like the intentions of the author were more politically motivated than anything else.

The author is a professor of ancient history at Oxford University. What makes you think it is political? A book can specialise in Western history without having a hidden agenda.

Lots of professors have political agendas, especially in the humanities.

Re: A 3K-year-old copper smelting site could be key to understanding origins of iron

#80

Post by roryirvine »

peterfirefly wrote: post #65
Sharlin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then someone will give that mee Iron sword/knife/axe a try , duel a friend, ruin their bronze weapon, and said friend will be like "holy shit I want an iron sword too it's way too good" and bam you got a meme. Iron is not a superior material to bronze, if anything it's inferior. Iron's either soft or brittle, depending on carbon content, neither of them awesome qualities in a tool or a weapon. Also, iron's consider…

> Where there was copper, there was no tin, and vice versa. There were some exceptions on the British Isles. Even some mines that had both.

Yeah, Cornwall was most famous for its tin, but there was a reasonable amount of copper too - particularly in the Carnon and Tamar valleys.

There were also very productive copper mines around Great Orme in North Wales, which would have only been a couple of days' travel by boat and were frequently visited as part of the same Atlantic Bronze Age trade routes as Cornish tin.

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