Native copper
Metal is first worked cold, hammered from nuggets found lying on the ground.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 4 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 1 thousand years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Copper occurs naturally in metallic form, and beads and small tools hammered from it appear in Anatolia and Iraq from around 9000 BCE — worked as an unusually malleable stone rather than understood as metal. Cold-hammering work-hardens it but also makes it brittle, and annealing over a fire is discovered as the fix. It is a two thousand year prelude to smelting.