The discovery of metals revolutionised civilisations. Making up around 25 percent of Earth’s crust, they have shaped the way we live and governed our development and progress as a society. Join us as we go back to the very beginnings of metallurgy, looking at the eight most influential metals that were harnessed in ancient times and some of the most notable uses of these metals.
Copper
AROUND 9,000 BCE
Found in Nature in vast quantities, copper is mostly locked away in Earth’s crust, occurring in oxidised states and in combination with other metals. But copper also occurs naturally in an uncombined form, and this native metallic copper, with its unmistakable reddish-orange hue, became the first metal used widely by ancient cultures, with the oldest artefacts dating back to around 9,000 BCE in the Middle East. It would take thousands of years before the first copper was extracted from ore, the oldest archaeological evidence of copper making by this method from around 5,500 BCE in Serbia.
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