TECHNOLOGY

The First Metal from Fire

~6,900 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian

The first people known to have coaxed metal out of rock lived not in Mesopotamia but in Balkan farming villages: at Belovode, in Serbia, copper was being smelted about 6,900 years ago, and the smelters chose their ores by colour, black and green together, a recipe held for centuries. Nearby Pločnik has even yielded a scrap of tin bronze some 6,500 years old. Metallurgy there was no priestly secret: a common and communal craft, practised among the houses.

Why it matters

Smelting is the first transformation of matter beyond recognition: rock in, gleaming metal out, through fire alone, and every subsequent metal age stands on it. The Balkan evidence broke the comfortable story of one Near Eastern cradle, reviving the idea that metallurgy, like farming, was invented more than once. Ötzi's copper axe, the best part of two millennia later, shows how far the craft had travelled by the time our best-preserved ancestor carried it.

Dating & uncertainty

Excavations at Belovode, Serbia, give chronologically and contextually secure evidence of copper smelting in the 49th century BCE, the earliest fully developed metallurgy known anywhere; a tin bronze foil from Pločnik, around 6,500 years old, extends the record of bronze making back by some 1,500 years. Found far from the Near East, both unsettle the conventional account of how metallurgy arose in Eurasia.

Sources

1. Radivojević et al. (2010), Journal of Archaeological Science · On the origins of extractive metallurgy: new evidence from Europedoi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.06.012
2. Radivojević et al. (2013), Antiquity · Tainted ores and the rise of tin bronzes in Eurasia, c. 6500 years agodoi:10.1017/s0003598x0004984x
3. Radivojević, Roberts et al. (2021), Archaeopress · The rise of metallurgy in Eurasia: evolution, organisation and consumption of early metal in the Balkansdoi:10.32028/9781803270425

Our species’ history as one day

23:28:2731 min 33 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day