I sort of knew that First Nations people around Lake Superior developed copper working over seven thousand years ago, well before anyone in the old world. The area had large deposits of pure copper nuggets, which they mined and smithed into ornaments and tools, for themselves and to trade.
What I hadn't known before was that after a few thousand years, around the time they turned from hunter-gathering to farming, those copper working peoples stopped using that copper for tools and just used it for ornaments. We're programmed to think of metal as superior to stone... but the extremely pure copper in those deposits was too soft, and thus inferior. With the transition to a new way of life and the need for new tools, they quit making tools with copper.
In the old world, on the other hand, natural copper nuggets had impurities that made the copper harder, and thus more interesting for producing tools, encouraging further experimentation in that direction, which led to smelting, bronze working, etc.
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I sort of knew that First Nations people around Lake Superior developed copper working over seven thousand years ago, well before anyone in the old world. The area had large deposits of pure copper nuggets, which they mined and smithed into ornaments and tools, for themselves and to trade.
What I hadn't known before was that after a few thousand years, around the time they turned from hunter-gathering to farming, those copper working peoples stopped using that copper for tools and just used it for ornaments. We're programmed to think of metal as superior to stone... but the extremely pure copper in those deposits was too soft, and thus inferior. With the transition to a new way of life and the need for new tools, they quit making tools with copper.
In the old world, on the other hand, natural copper nuggets had impurities that made the copper harder, and thus more interesting for producing tools, encouraging further experimentation in that direction, which led to smelting, bronze working, etc.
More here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42185-y
And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Copper_Complex