TechnologyEurope

Copper smelted from stone

5,001 BCE

Humans discover that rock can become metal

In depth

Smelting requires over a thousand degrees and a closed, oxygen-poor hearth — probably discovered through pottery kilns. The cemetery at Varna on the Black Sea, from around 4600 BCE, holds more worked gold than the rest of the world of its day combined, and some graves are immeasurably richer than others. It is among the earliest clear traces of inherited inequality.

For children

Someone discovered that heating a particular green stone hard enough makes shining metal run out of it. It must have looked like magic. Copper is soft, but it can be shaped into anything — and it opened the road to bronze and iron.

Connects to

Bronze and the wheel3,301 BCE
The Iron Age1,201 BCE
The first pots18,001 BCE

Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org