This question has been bugging me for a while now, any ideas which came first? It seems like the only way to get metal is to mine for it with something hard like a metal. Or were the first picks just flint spears/clovis points? If so, how can you mine copper and tin with flint or bone tools?
If some metal was available without mining, how could one make a pick out of it? It would require smelting, which would require a furnace, made out of stone or metal, which would have to be mined... with a pickaxe.
Or if the furnace were made of brick, from clay, where did we get the heat to fire the clay, without a furnace to begin with?
And where does the hatchet fit into all this, did it (and lumber) come before or after metals and picks? Smelting would require wood, which would need to be cut with an axe, which would have to be smelted, with red-hot metal heated by lumber...
If anyone could shed some light on this, that would be great, thanks!
Here is a picture of a prehistoric pick made of deer-antler. This was used to mine flint.
And here is a description of ancient mining from the Swaziland National Trust Commission. I link this because it describes what's considered one of the oldest mines discovered, where such a pickaxe could have been used to mine hematite, a mineral form of iron oxide.
Finally, a description from a UNC site that describes Roman mining. One of the key things to note is that even stone tools can be used to mine softer metals. Not to mention that there are other ways to obtain metals besides mining, such as gold from riverbeds, or the Roman method of exposing iron bedrock.
So the pickaxe came first. The point here is that we can use different material to mine different material. And we can then take these metals, especially the softer ones, and through a process of metallurgy, created stronger pickaxes which can ultimately make mining easier and could further uncover different metals.
The answer to your question is that metals other than iron are not difficult to smelt. You don't need a special furnace to smelt copper and tin, from which they made bronze tools, which they used to mine iron. Of course they learned how to smelt iron only after a long period, the Bronze Age lasted for some 2000 years until they learned how to smelt iron, which started the Iron Age.
hi! this is not going to answer all of your questions, but thought you might be interested in this section of the FAQ as a starting point
Most of the early metals that were used were ores or straight metallic form that could be found on the surface. This is true for the copper and tin needed to make bronze, for gold, and for iron.
Mining only became necessary when the demand for these metals increased. And much of the early mining wasn't the more modern technique of using a pickaxe on stone. Things like bog-iron ore could stack up on top of itself over millions of years as the bacteria slowly filtered and collected it from the waters. but on the surface, you can just stumble around a bog, look for rusty orange water, and search about with a stick for fist-sized balls of what looks like a clump of dark red dirt that's a bit heavy for it's size. This is iron oxide, and can be heated in the presence of carbon (from wood or better yet charcoal) to turn it into elemental iron, or potentially, even steel. (cast iron is a little more difficult. That took Europe millenia to work out, though China had it figured out quite awhile before europe.)
You can make a furnace or foundry out of wet clay, sand, and some fibrous material such as straw. Although hardness isn't really critical, the act of running the furnace causes the clay to harden. You can make a crucible from a piece of pottery. As long as it is heated gradually, it stays together even under extreme heat. It doesn't take terribly much heat to melt bronze. It can even be done on a wood fire, though charcoal would be more effective. When the metal reaches a melting point, it can be poured into a sand mold. Then it is left to cool and then worked. When hammered cold, bronze work-hardens to something that is nearly as hard as early iron. At first, iron only really took over because the ore is so much more plentiful than the copper and tin, that often required good trade routes to bring together.
While a copper air-pipe is superior for making a furnace, you can just as well make one again from clay. Onto that clay pipe, you attach an animal hide bag, open at the top. By opening the bag, you can lift it to fill the bag with air. Then closing the bag and squashing it down causes that air to flow into the pipe. By operating 2 at the same time in alternation, you can keep the airflow continuous. Or you can work out how flap valves work and you can make more modern forms of bellows with little more than leather, some hide-glue and a little wood.
For iron smelting, the early furnaces, called bloomeries were made one day, fired the next, and then generally destroyed that evening to extract the iron bloom. Again, the iron doesn't really liquify, it just collects in the form of a spongy bloom at the bottom of the bloomery. Early blooms could be worked using a stone anvil and stone hammers. This would get you an iron billet, and this could then be worked into metal tools.
Clay bricks are made from wet clay, which is then left out to dry. Once dry it is firm enough to be stacked up carefully in such a way that you have an entire oven of bricks. You can then run a fire in that oven. When firing is finished and the bricks have had a couple days to cool, the oven is taken apart (no mortar was involved) and the bricks are sent where they are needed. The bricks that made up the outside of then oven would not be as well fired. They would either be fired again in the next firing, or they would be used in applications that don't require such hardness and resistance to the elements.
Woodcutting was first done with tools made from stone or animal bones and horn. You can find videos of experimental archaeologists using these tools, and they work decently enough. Additional wood can just be collected as trees and branches naturally die. The process of converting wood into charcoal can be done with little more than making a pile of wood, covering it with dirt properly, and lighting the wood. You control how much air gets to the wood carefully, and in about 3 days, you've got a pile of charcoal; no metal tools required.
If you want to learn more about mining, you should find a good translated version of De Rey Metallica by Agricola. It is a medieval/early-renaissance text, but from the words and the gorgeous woodblock prints, it becomes much easier to start to see how the processes evolved.