How did we cut our hair and nails without metal objects? Metallurgy, like speech and writing are probably available to man since the fall, around 6000 years ago and certainly since the flood approximately 4,400 years ago.
Good point.
The
Bronze Age is a historical period lasting from approximately 3300 to 1200 BC. It is characterized by the use of
bronze, the use of writing in some areas, and other features of early urban
civilization. The Bronze Age is the middle principal period of the
three-age system, between the
Stone and
Iron Ages.
[1] This system was proposed in 1836 by
Christian Jürgensen Thomsen for classifying and studying ancient societies and history. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the
Neolithic period, with the
Chalcolithic serving as a transition.
The periodisation of the Bronze Age is generally ended with the
Late Bronze Age collapse, a time of widespread
societal collapse between
c. 1200 and 1150 BC. This collapse affected a large area of the
Eastern Mediterranean, including
North Africa and
Southeast Europe, as well as the
Near East, in particular
Egypt,
eastern Libya, the
Balkans, the
Aegean,
Anatolia, and the
Caucasus. It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers, most notably ushering in the
Greek Dark Ages.
An ancient civilization is deemed to be part of the Bronze Age if it either produced bronze by
smelting its own
copper and
alloying it with
tin,
arsenic, or other metals, or traded other items for bronze from producing areas elsewhere.
Bronze Age civilizations gained a technological advantage due to bronze's harder and more durable properties than other metals available at the time. While terrestrial
iron is naturally abundant, the higher temperature required for smelting, 1,250 °C (2,280 °F), in addition to the greater difficulty of working with the metal, placed it out of reach of common use until the end of the second millennium BC. Tin's lower melting point of 232 °C (450 °F) and copper's relatively moderate melting point of 1,085 °C (1,985 °F) placed both these metals within the capabilities of Neolithic
pottery kilns, which date back to 6,000 BC and were able to produce temperatures of at least 900 °C (1,650 °F).
[2] Copper and tin ores are rare since there were no tin bronzes in
West Asia before trading in bronze began in the
3rd millennium BC.