History of Metals

History of Metals
Why and how did man first begin to use metals?   How did he extract them without the advanced technology and knowledge that we have today, as early as 6000 BC?
As human society developed and became more advanced, human needs increased.   Human groups began to change from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled lifestyle. They created settlements, began to cultivate the land and kept animals. As these became more complex, human needs expanded and required a wide range of things, such as tools, building supplies, hunting, defense, cooking, worship, storage, etc.   A material was needed that could be easily shaped to suit all these needs, and that was hard, strong and did not decay or burn easily.   Metals fit all these categories and are ideal for all these basic human needs.   The only problem was the difficulty of finding and extracting metals.   So at fist humans shaped pieces of stone and wood to suit their needs, but it soon became obvious that metals, due to the above properties, were far superior.   This was discovered when small amounts of metals were accidentally discovered and experimented with.  
The first metals would have been naturally occurring metals, especially the then-abundant metal gold, and silver and platinum in smaller amounts.   As these are relatively unreactive elements (to the right of the Activity Series), they do not easily form compounds with other elements, so they can be found as uncombined, pure metals underground.   For example, gold can be found as nuggets or veins in quartz or grains in alluvial sands.   The element copper, although more reactive than gold and silver, is occasionally found as an uncombined element, sometimes even as large underground pockets.   Natural uncombined iron was also sometimes discovered, but this was not from underground but from space – meteoritic iron.   All these metals could be stumbled upon and experimented with by an inquisitive human of the Neolithic Age, and it properties, such as lustre,...