Stone age to Iron age transition

[caters]

My Kepler Bb people currently use these materials when building anything from toys to homes and buildings:


Mud
Clay
Grass
Wood
Rocks


Here is how each one is used:

In the case of things like homes and buildings and furniture, wood is used as the main building material. Some toys are made with wood and others with clay.

Rocks are used for 1 of 3 purposes:


Sharp edge or point(arrows, knives, etc.)
Stabilization of chambers and tunnels(so columns)
Climbing assistance(young children climbing in chambers and tunnels need rocks to support them)


Mud and clay are both used to hold rocks in place be it next to another rock, next to wood, or surrounded by soil. Only clay is used to hold 2 pieces of wood together because mud will easily become saturated with water. In other words mud is very porous. This is okay underground where it is drier anyway but it is not okay on the surface when it rains. Clay though is not nearly as porous and once it is dried, it can handle any amount of water from that of a severe storm to that of a drought. It is when it is still either wet or leather hard that clay has the same easily saturated weakness that mud does.

Grass is used when weaving is needed whether it be for a roof or for clothing.

These 5 materials used by themselves is what makes this stone age technology. But in every mile of the planet there is at least 1 area if not more of iron ore underground. These people know that this supposed rock that is really a metal oxide is different from all the rocks they use for building things. They know that some have the ability to attract others but they don't know that this attraction is actually magnetism.

Now I know that you can melt iron ore into iron using coke and limestone in a blast furnace but that itself requires metal that has a higher melting point than iron This requires 1 of 2 things:

A rare metal with a higher melting point than iron(Like for example Platinum melts at 3220 degrees Fahrenheit which is higher than that of iron)

or

An alloy which itself requires the pure metal

That is for technology similar to stone age technology. Of course in our information age we can use induction and several other methods to melt these metals without melting what the metal is in while still using common metals in the process.

So I have run into a problem. How can you melt metal with stone age technology? So in other words how could you use just mud, clay, rocks, wood, and grass and not melt or burn any of these materials(except for your heat source) while melting the metal?

[Lleban]

With a kiln (which is made of the materials you mentioned) people in the stone age could reach temperature of greater than 1000 C which is ideal for making bronze; also temperature in this area is enough to reduce iron oxide to pure iron. In saying that smelting bronze inst a prerequisite to smelting iron, subsaharan Africa is a good example of where development went from stone to iron age.

hope that helps a little

[jqavins]

As Lleban implied, the intermediary bronze age was important in many parts of Earth's history, but, as Lleban actually stated, not all of them. As Lleban also hinted, temperatures high enough to melt iron are not required in order to smelt it. (That 's' at the begining is real important.) In much of the world, copper and its alloys were developed before iron because the smelting temperature is lower.

I used the word "developed" above rather than "discovered" or "invented" because iron was known for a long time, but either too difficult or too expensive to produce in quantity to make its widespread use practical.

Clay, no matter how well dried, can still be softened and eroded by water until it's fired. Drying just makes that take longer. "Mud" is as imprecise a term as "dirt." Soil in general is a mixture of clay, sand, and organic matter. The soil, or mud, that's good for making things is low in organics and usually low in sand. In other words, "mud" in this context is either the same as clay or pretty close.

One doesn't usually melt Iron, if one melts it at all, in a metal vessel. (Platinum, tungsten, and so on are much too scarce, expensive, and difficult to form.) One uses some sort of ceramic. Graphite and modern ceramics have their advantages, but the right stones or well fired clays serve quite well.

In short (and I'm sorry if this sounds insulting; I realize it might but I really don't mean it to) your question is much too general to answer, and seems to be based on a large number of misconceptions. I suggest some time at Wikipedia and other sources reading up on early metalurgy. Read especially about the bloomery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery) process. Then ask again, if you still need to.

[Blake Hannon]

You usually go stone > chalcolithic >bronze > iron, but as others have pointed out its possible to skip the middle two if you have access to the right resources.

[Murk]

You usually go stone > chalcolithic >bronze > iron, but as others have pointed out its possible to skip the middle two if you have access to the right resources.

Or, just to add, get stuck in one of the earlier (there were plenty of regions on our planet where ironwork was unknown. There were even plenty of regions where melting copper wasn't practiced)

[jqavins]

Or, just to add, get stuck in one of the earlier (there were plenty of regions on our planet where ironwork was unknown...
Well, sure, but since the original question was about how the transition to iron is made, not the more general question of how metallurgy advances, the cases where the transition to iron does not occur are not of interest.

[Zorku]

Since I think you're looking for more of a narrative...


Depends a bit on what you've got access to, but plenty of civs that we visualize as just making things from mud, making pottery, and making beads were also plenty familiar with melting copper.

If you want to talk smithing copper is soft enough to work and is fairly useful as far as soft metals go. Tin Zinc and Bismuth can also be refined well enough without other metals to use (though zinc has a very narrow range where you can work it before it evaporates,) but they're much less common than copper so they are basically not interesting until your people learn about alloys (most likely with some backwards notions such as thinking that they are actually making a substance more 'pure' when it starts to show useful properties.)

This is a suitable stepping stone to get to bronze, which is actually superior to basic iron and poor quality steel. As a copper alloy you naturally get more useful metal than you would if you used plain ole copper, but it also takes tin to produce so you've got to be fairly good at finding deposits of metal, and at this point there's probably no real prospecting to speak of, so much as just happening upon a weird looking streak of rock while you're out tracking down your dinner one day. There's technically a few mining operations around, but you're having slaves dig into thick clay deposits and you're using stuff like archimedes screw to mostly keep them from drowning in the process.

For a powerful nation this stuff is suitable to outfit your armies, but as we saw with Rome it's still rare enough and expensive enough that you just make some pauldrons and helmets and things out of the stuff- can't really acquire enough to stuff your 300 into full plate.

Iron is a bit of an oddity for awhile. You can find rusty streaks of the stuff just like anything else, but it probably takes awhile before your civ realizes that there's a lot of potential here if they bore right down into the earth to try and get at the stuff more directly, and it comes in a lot of visually distinct forms a lot like copper, so it's not something you can just flash in front of the peasantfolk and expect them to recognize when they stumble over it.

The population boom and war industry in Europe made iron a lot more valuable, so folks figure out the subsurface mining concept well enough and started tapping into way more of the stuff. With a really booming metalworking industry you get a few smiths that hit on some really rudimentary forms of steel during their smelting process, but for the most part nobody realizes quite what's going on or how to produce a high quality steel.