How many ages have there been

In fact, only fourteen large animal species that is, animals in excess of pounds have ever been domesticated, and only one of these is native to a region outside Eurasia: the llama, in South America.

The Neolithic age was succeeded in Eurasia by the bronze age. In a given region, the bronze age is considered to begin when bronze becomes a much-used material for practical objects i. The term "bronze age" is generally not applied if only a few bronze tools are being made, or if bronze is only being used for jewellery.

The key prerequisite to the bronze age was the development of smelting the process of extracting metal from ore. Once a sufficient volume of metal has been smelted, it can be hammered or cast melted and poured into a mould into a desired shape. Smelting technology first emerged in Southwest Asia. The first metal to be smelted was copper. Being a rather soft metal, copper was not a dramatic improvement over stone for the crafting of tools and weapons. It was eventually discovered, however, that by blending copper with tin, one obtains a much harder metal: bronze.

Occasionally, other elements were used instead of tin. The bronze age of Southwest Asia spanned ca. Like agriculture, bronze technology radiated from Southwest Asia in all directions, taking roughly a thousand years to cover the entire east-west span of mainland Eurasia from Britain to China.

Thus, by ca. The iron age began in Southwest Asia ca. The iron age also diffused across North Africa, and then unlike the bronze age southward across sub-Saharan Africa. It crossed the Sahara Desert by travelling down the Nile through Egypt into Nubia , and may also have crossed at other points farther west. Diffusion was slower than in Eurasia; it took about a thousand years for the iron age to reach southern Africa.

It should be noted that the above descriptions of the spread of the bronze and iron ages are meant to convey the broad, overall picture. Most likely, these ages did not begin solely in Southwest Asia, but were arrived at independently at later dates in other regions as well. The transition to the iron age was critical not because of any property of the metal itself iron is not harder than bronze , but rather because iron is overwhelmingly more abundant than copper and tin.

This enabled, for the first time in history, true mass-production of metal tools and weapons. Both agriculture and warfare to take two prominent examples were thereby revolutionized, since metal implements are far more effective than stone in both endeavours.

The bronze and iron ages have little relevance for the pre-colonial Americas. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the bronze age was reached only by the Inca the final Andean civilization , while the iron age did not occur at all. Timeline of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages ca. Pre-human Evolution About 14 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave birth to a universe containing pockets of dust.

Since Jesus had been born in the "sixth hour", or halfway through a day or, five hundred years into an Age , and since five kingdoms five thousand years had already fallen according to Revelation, plus the half day of Jesus the body of Jesus replacing the Ark of the Jews , it meant that five-thousand five-hundred years had already passed when Jesus was born and another years would mark the end of the world.

An alternative scheme had set the date to the year , but when this date passed without event, people expected the end in the year Image Source: en. In case of platinum, however, the melting point is o C o F , so it's not so easy to do. There are other methods , however, that may have been used in ancient times for extracting gold from the rocks that contain it e.

In contrast to gold Au , silver Ag is typically s melted. You can find elemental silver in many places but it is quite rare and mostly you go for its ore, typically a sulfide, often mixed up with lead ore.

You do know that silver it not noble enough to withstand the lure of sulfur S. Your Grandma never let you eat a sulfur-rich egg with her silver spoons on the grounds that it it would quickly tarnish, i. Well, here is some elemental silver. It is very pretty and you can get an idea why some cultures treasured it more than gold. Elemental or native silver Source: Internet. Most copper minerals, in particular malachite and azurite, have bright colors green or deep blue, respectively and were used as gemstones for millennia.

Here is a picture:. Azurite blue and Malachite green. We can be reasonably sure that the first smelting happened accidentally. It's just not conceivable that some ancient guys, after having had a few beers of course there was always some kind of beer around, you just can't have a decent civilization otherwise , were inspired enough to come up with the idea "hey, how about smelting a few metals now"?

It is often assumed that accidental smelting could have happened if some lead or copper ore happened to be in that fire pit used for barbecuing mammoth spare ribs.

If you take one of the pretty copper ores to decorate your "green" ware, and your pottery pit fire happens to be very hot, you might get copper this way. I did subscribe to that view myself some time ago - but now I'm not so sure anymore. All of the above could have happened, indeed, but accidental smelting like that is far more unlikely than it appears at a first glance. Not impossible but unlikely. Nevertheless, it must have happened, and it probably happened more than once before the first ancient engineer noticed that you could make metals this way intentionally.

You had to be in a relaxed state of mind to come up with this idea and drinking beer certainly helped. So did some already advanced " pyrotechnology ", the use of fire to do high temperature processing. Advanced Link Swords and Beer. The big question is: When, what, where and who?

When did the first intentional smelting take place, where was that, who made that discovery - just one guy from whom it spread, or many guys independently - and finally what kind of simple-to-smelt metal was produced first? Nobody knows for sure. If the malachite mine shown above is really from the 6th century BC, it would give a date for early copper smelting. But the ancient miners may have dug out the malachite not for smelting copper but for making jewelry with it.

Looking in the Internet or in books, you find a lot of dates and finds claiming for a "first". However, thanks to the advent of archeometallurgy , a lot if not all of reported "firsts" are now disputed. Lead could only have been obtained by smelting, so here is the answer to the question above?

This is a quote from a very good blog that you can access in this link , and that has the most recent information about the topic. Galena or lead sulfide PbS , by the way, does look a lot like elemental lead; it's thus easy to make that mistake. Here is a picture of galena:.

Well - no. That mace head is now considered to be made from native copper that was hammer welded. There is some indication of the seam on the left hand side. Just how you hammer some copper into a kind of hollow sphere is a different question. I'm sure my grandfather, who was a smith, would have known how to do this. Read more in this link. Copper mace head from Can Hasan. However, this is not worked copper but ground and polished copper ore, probably from Turkey to the north.

It is made up of malachite and chrysocolla but happens to contain a fair amount of native copper". That's a quote from this source. Even more here. Example: The eminent scientists Sherby and Wadsworth, well-known to students of ancient steel, got so fed up with the prevalent age dogma, that they wrote a full paper 1 proposing that the iron age not only precedes the bronze age but may even go back to Neanderthal times, i.

I don't believe that for a second - but that is believe and not knowledge. Be that as it may, smelting of copper and so on was definitely done as far back as 5. It is clear that if you could smelt copper intentionally, you could also melt and possibly alloy it. That doesn't mean, however, that everything was now made by casting. Below is an example of a rather "new" and complex copper artifact from 2. However - I don't know for sure. No mention of how it was produced is made, and no picture of those "Anatolian seals" is provided either.

Well, here is that wagon; more about the problems with exhibits like that in this link. Making bronze means you need to do do some alloying , mixing two or more metals. Alloying can be done in two ways. Accidentially or intentionally. Accidential alloying happens if your ore contains not only copper compounds but also, for example arsenic As or antimony Sb compounds.

This is actually rather common. In the smelting process, metallic arsenic As may also be produced and dissolves in the copper. What you get is what is called an arsenic bronze if the arsenic concentration reaches at least a few percent.

Intentional alloying happens if you either add intentionally some special ores to your copper ore, or if you produce an alloying element separately, for example tin Sn , and then melt a mix of copper and tin to make tin bronze. The first smelters must have noticed that results depended on what you put into your smelter. If you got some kind of bronze instead of relatively pure copper, you couldn't fail to notice that it was harder than copper and thus more useful.

Why an alloy is always harder than the pure metal you will learn if you keep reading this Hyperscript. Again, it is not so clear when and where serious alloying technology started. The best guess is between 4 BC and 3 BC. The pyramid builders in Egypt 2 BC - 2 BC , however, appear not to have used bronze as outlined above.

Around 2. But by 2. That means that there must have been several centuries before that, when the technology was there but not yet fully developed. It is one thing to know about some technology, and another thing to use it.

The Egyptians may not have had easy access to tin tin ore is far rarer than copper ore , or simply kept on doing whatever they did the old-fashioned way.

So they new about the superior technology but couldn't do it for some reason. This is nothing new. A lot of present-day cultures know about microelectronic chips or solar cells but can't make it either. These two are also from the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The text in the exhibition states only hat this is "arsenical copper" whatever that means from Iran or Mesopotamia, from around 3 BC.

This figure was obviously cast but this is not mentioned in the exhibition. In the Internet we learn that it is a Proto-Elamite copper alloy , and quite a bit about the the context of the figure, including: "This solid-cast sculpture is one of a pair It looks cast to me, probably in several individual pieces that then were joined together.

The museum does not provide any information about this in the exhibit or in the Internet. Around 2 BC, when proper tin-bronze technology was well established, the next technological breakthrough occurred and the next "age" came up.

Difficult metals in this context means by default that i smelting could still be done with carbon as reducing agent and ii the melting points of the metals to be produced is well above o C o F.

That certainly covers iron , the topic of this Hyperscript. Its melting point is 1 o C 2 o F. Note that ancient man did not make and use these metals - but this is the category they would belong to.

I'm not going to say much about iron technology here; this is what the whole Hyperscript is for. I'm just going to make a few points to stay within the system.

First: Smelting of iron is not much more difficult than smelting copper - as long as you get everything just right. Lots of people with some interest in early technology now do it routinely as a weekend group activity. The reason is that you do not have to reach the melting temperature of iron, a mere o C 1. Second: The low-temperature smelting process, however, is not very efficient. The ratio of what you put in and what you get out is rather bad. Third: What you get is not iron but, with luck, a "bloom": a lump of spongy and porous iron and steel, intimately mixed with slag and God knows what else.

Fourth: The real technological break-through thus involved not only some reliable procss to making a bloom but also everything one might subsume under " forging ". This contains a lot of processing steps, from banging your red-hot mess of iron and dirt the "bloom" obtained right after smelting with a hammer in order to compact it and to squeeze out some dirt and slag, up to the final forging of extremely complex and fine objects like swords, with many steps in between.

Don't forget: you couldn't cast iron or steel! Iron Sword from Luristan. The iron dagger of famous King Tutankhamun is one of the oldest well-preserved iron objects in the world; it dates from around 1. It has never been properly investigated! Well, that is no longer true. In the dagger was investigated by X-ray fluorescence without touching it and found to be made from meteoritic iron!

More about that here. To me, the "handle" of the iron sword in the Metropolitan looks very much like it was cast. Then it can't be iron; must be bronze. If it was no cast but forged, this would be remarkable and should be mentioned.

We have just one more example of the lackadaisical attitude museums take when it comes to anything remotely "technical" and not artistic. I will have to say much more about the Luristan swords later on. They all come from illegal digging about years ago. In recent years they have been recognized as being very special; they seem to be also about years older than what is stated above. The Metropolitan, by the way, is no longer exhibiting "its" sword in It's Scythian work form the 5th - 6th century BC and about years younger than the Luristan sword.

It is, like most iron objects that old, just a piece of rust by now, not unlike the knife from what is now Moldova. Some metals and other elements like to be associated with oxygen even more then carbon does. They simply will not yield their oxygen or whatever else they are bonded with to carbon under any circumstances. Removing the oxygen or whatever from this elements means to "reduce" them, which in turn means to transfer some electrons to the element. That is what carbon does if the element is susceptible to carbon smelting.

If carbon can't do that, you could actually use aluminum as reducing agent. You can "smelt" silicon from its oxide SiO 2 or quartz with aluminum powder; I've actually done that - but you need aluminum first. Using electricity is by far the easiest way to force some electrons on the aluminum atoms in a compound, and that's the way it's done for all the "very difficult metals". Aluminium is exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores like the other elements in this group.

Aluminum was more valuable than gold before the late s, when electricity became available on a large scale and production started in earnest. The apex of the pyramid on top of the Washington monument in Washington, D.

Similar stories apply to the other "difficult" metals. Home dwellings morphed to so-called roundhouses, consisting of a circular stone wall with a thatched or turf roof, complete with a fireplace or hearth, and more villages and cities began to form. Organized government, law and warfare, as well as beginnings of religion, also came into play during the Bronze Age, perhaps most notably relating to the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids during this time.

The earliest written accounts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and petroglyphs rock engravings , are also dated to this era. The discovery of ways to heat and forge iron kicked off the Iron Age roughly 1, B. At the time, the metal was seen as more precious than gold, and wrought iron which would be replaced by steel with the advent of smelting iron was easier to manufacture than bronze.

Along with mass production of steel tools and weapons, the age saw even further advances in architecture, with four-room homes, some complete with stables for animals, joining more rudimentary hill forts, as well as royal palaces, temples and other religious structures.

Early city planning also took place, with blocks of homes being erected along paved or cobblestone streets and water systems put into place. Agriculture, art and religion all became more sophisticated, and writing systems and written documentation, including alphabets, began to emerge, ushering in the Early Historical Period.

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