I would really like to understand how our ancestors figured out how to make metals so many millenia ago.
How did they figure out which stone to use? How did they even come to the idea to melt said stone? How did they get temperatures high enough (was someone just testing if they could melt rocks)? How did they find out that mixing tin and copper - two very different metals - made bronze - a stronger metal?
Thank you for your answer!
It's actually surprisingly easier than you might think.
For one, some metals exist naturally, as so-called "native metals", out in the open in small quantities on the surface of the Earth. Such as copper, gold, iron (including meteoritic iron), etc. Naturally these would have drawn the attention of ancient peoples and they would have begun learning about these materials fairly early on.
More so, for a significant number of metals high grade ores have a very distinctive and attractive appearance. Malachite, for example, a copper ore, is a bright blue-green color. Cassiterite, a tin ore, is very shiny with angular surfaces. Galena, a lead ore, is also very shiny and angular. And, of course, gold is very notable even when it exists in flakes and nuggets, which were some of the earliest forms of gold that were mined.
Additionally, many of these ores are very easy to smelt because the metals have fairly low melting points. A typical way to smelt copper ore would be to expose the ore to high temperatures and carbon monoxide, which will reduce the ore to its pure metallic form. Melting the metal also serves to separate it from the impurities in the ore (such as glass, etc.) You don't need very high temperatures to do this, in fact a typical camp fire is more than hot enough and produces more than enough carbon monoxide internally to smelt small amounts of copper ore in this way. So if for whatever reason you put your unusual rocks in your fire you would quickly discover smelting, and it wouldn't take long to iterate through how to improve the process.
And in terms of making things with these materials, that's also fairly straightforward, you just pour the liquid metal into a mold, which is something that is quite readily discovered as well.
The history of bronze is a bit more complicated. Lots of people independently discovered that combining other things with copper led to superior materials, and it appears that the discovery of advanced bronze working was discovered independently in the ancient near east and in China. Though in large part the knowledge was disseminated across continents.
Hi, not discouraging direct responses here, but thought you might be interested in some previous threads on prospecting / mining / processing.
If you have follow-up questions on any archived posts, just ask them here and tag the user's username to notify them.
Also, you might consider x-posting to /r/AskAnthropology for their input also.