How did our ancestors discover Bronze?
The Stone Age is considered the period in human history where the most advanced things on the planet that people were able to create were sharpened pieces of stone, but this invention was more important than it sounds. Hunting now became possible and allowed more food for the winter and access to leather to make clothes and tents, but how did people get from chipping away at pieces of stone to smelting their own weapons and armor from Bronze?
First, it’s important to understand the contrast between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, as the Stone Age lasted for around 2.5 million years and only ended about 5,000 years ago. In Britain, the Bronze Age started around 3,000 BCE but there was also up to 500 years before that which was the copper age, the first real metal age of the human race.
People have only been recognized as modern humans starting around 50,000 BCE when we finally evolved from our previous human-like ancestors and developed brains powerful enough to start to work out what’s going on. The last ice age ended around 10,000 BCE and opened up a huge expanse of land previously covered in ice and with it a huge amount of new resources, but it would still be a long time until someone worked out how to use them.
The earliest evidence of metal use in Britain comes from between 3,000 and 3,500 BCE where basic copper tools were used, but it’s likely that they discovered other metals that were useless to them before this. Lead and tin both have low melting points and could be smelted in an open fire, but both are far too weak to make anything useful from, even copper isn’t exactly a good choice but at least it was considerably stronger than anything else they would have had access to.​
How did our ancestors make Bronze?
Bronze is an alloy made by combining copper and tin in a ratio of between 10% and 15% tin with the rest being copper. This alloy is much stronger than either metal on its own and would allow people to make tools and weapons that were actually useful. A bronze axe would still blunt quickly but nowhere near as fast as one made from copper alone, but how they discovered it in the first place is anyone’s guess, though it most likely would have been done by accident.
It wouldn’t take long for people to realize that lining the outside of your fire with stone will stop it from spreading, and in a world where all the mineral deposits are completely intact and untouched, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume there would have been a large amount of ore just sitting on the surface. At some point someone would have used some of this ore and noticed the metal run off coming out, or at least that’s how I imagined it happened.
No one in Britain, or the rest of the world for that matter, had an in-depth writing system that could convey a message word for word, and because of this no one kept any documents or scripts that we could reference, leaving most of it to guess work and the occasional item recovered from a dig.
The discovery of making bronze would probably be the result of either accident or experimentation, but after it was discovered, the technology spread across the whole British Isles within a few decades, and remained as the strongest material known to man until the start of the Iron Age.
