Copper smelting
Rock is heated until metal runs out of it — the first time a substance is transformed into another.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Securely dated evidence from Belovode in Serbia puts copper smelting at around 5000 BCE, with the Near East and Iran following closely. Extracting metal from ore requires temperatures near 1100 degrees and a reducing atmosphere, and the result looks nothing like the green rock that went in. It is the beginning of metallurgy and, arguably, of chemistry: the first demonstration that materials are not fixed in kind.