TecC 14 - Blending Forces, Breeding Innovation
When elements embraced change, forging the path forward
In the last few episodes I’ve touched upon a few important human innovations. I now want to show, as part of demonstrating the power and value of accumulation and integration of innovation, that these did not necessarily occur all in isolation, that they eventually came together to define a new age, the Bronze Age.
I have touched upon this idea before, and will perhaps investigate and elaborate in greater epistemological depth in the parallel Polymathon series, but by and large human progress is the result of the accumulation of innovations. Advancements build upon other innovations (just as innovators and inventors themselves do, in the famous giant-shoulderly words of Newton!), innovations may be combined with other breakthroughs, progress breeds progress. And the appreciation of this is a vital part of our journey here, in not only understanding the phenomenon, but even applying it in other areas ourselves.
Thus our newer friend Bronze-Age Bryan1 has or will have a greater number of epistemic (or intellectual) artefacts in his repertoire to draw from, compared to our older friend, Stone-Age Steve, not only in trying to make sense of an existing natural or technological phenomenon in his time, but potentially in putting things together to make further innovations. I have been using lone characters in envisaging and thus even epitomizing the development of key innovations we’ve covered, but I’ll reiterate that much human innovation, especially as things become complex, was and is anything but lone-wolf: alongside ‘cumulative’ it was often collaborative.
For hundreds of thousands of years, if not more, man was content with the use of sharpened stone tools, and that was that. Of course we look back at such a past and call it ‘primitive’ usually with a derogatory tone, but as we’ve discussed before, the intellectual leap that went along with the artefactual breakthrough, from stone to the next stage, is massive. This next stage is of course the use of metal. Stone was abundantly and conspicuously available all around humans, in their hunter-gatherer, and even later, early agricultural existence, and there was no real upfront effort in making stone the source of whatever artefact you wanted to build. Let’s go back in time in our usual fashion and explore how Bryan might have brought about the Bronze Age!
Hot Takes
We go back to our cosy setting where we’ve met Bryan previously, beside a burning fire on which he’s cooked some juicy meat and is accompanied by his trusty canine pal, Bruno. Bryan is bored. There’s some wet mud in the surroundings since it had rained a while ago, and Bryan is just playing creating funny shapes with the wet mud - a bone, a ball, a disc. He then throws some of them into the fire not giving it much thought.
The next day, he notices that these molded clay objects he threw into the fire have hardened, and look somewhat attractive, or at the very least novel and intriguing. Bryan, since he’s been part of our journey here, already knows about the innovations we’ve previously covered - fire, of course, but also the cylindrical and circular objects he’s been playing with. See previous episode.
You can see where I’m going with this. The key point I’m making here is the realization that fire can change the properties of materials available in the surroundings. That was probably the first breakthrough. It would have led the curious, like our friend, to experiment with other materials as well.
Again, we don’t know for sure how exactly the idea of pottery - making pots on a wheel might have come about, but picture Bryan playing with the logs and discs, maybe he placed some of that clay - the wet mud, on such a circular device while its turning, boredom can lead to all sorts of behavior! But at some point, humans stumbled upon the idea of making hollow circular objects, by shaping clay on a rotating wheel. And combined with the phenomenon of hardening clay using fire they would have come to appreciate the practical utility of such a device - the pot!
This practical device, essentially a container, can be put to many uses. For example, Bryan can now carry some water from the nearby stream, more reliably than in cupped hands, and pour it on the meat cooking on the fire, first for fun, but then because he thinks the meat turns out tastier after a nice sizzle! More practical uses ensue, storage of food, especially wet foods, but also cooking food items going beyond just meat on direct fire.
As we’ve seen with the development of the wheel in the previous episode, this would more likely have taken a long time of iterative experimentation, we cannot be fully sure, but the above thought experiment should illustrate a likely trajectory of development. Which matters because we’re trying to position ourselves epistemically at that point prior to such innovation materializing.
An Alloyed Good
But there is another material innovation that is even more, well, material! What we have traced above, the observation by humans that subjecting certain materials to intense heat changes their properties, and permanently, is perhaps something that happened very early on in the Stone Age, but took some time to be embedded in the consciousness, at least from a practical standpoint.
Over time, humans would have experimented with this, and I suspect the intellectual leap in the idea of using high temperatures to extract metals from their ores was a precursor to its eventual implementation. This is because the typical temperatures needed for smelting metal, above 1000℃, would have required some conscious arrangement, and not so much of an accident of casually throwing ores into an open fire.
Let’s take a closer look at how they specifically got to bronze. Bronze is not a metal, it’s an alloy, a combination of metals, mainly copper. The first metal man encountered might have been copper, in particular naturally occurring metallic copper, called native copper. However, as you probably have experienced using copper wire for an electrical experiment, copper is not very hard. So to make it more practical, the next step up from using pure copper would have been a combination of copper and something else. Initially this requirement was met by arsenic-rich copper ores, as the presence of arsenic decreases the melting point of copper making it easier to work on, apart from increasing the hardness of the resulting material.
However, arsenic being toxic, as discovered in skeletal remains with high arsenic levels, it was necessary to find alternatives. But here, along with the cognitive leap that fire can change the nature of substances, were related ones such as, certain elements can be ‘extracted’ from natural deposits, ie, pure metals from ores, but also that mixing metals could bring about stronger, more durable material outcomes.
This then required two other key innovations - one is institutional, in finding other components of the alloy not locally available, the trade networks needed for this; and the other, technical, improving furnace technology to handle the much higher temperatures such other elements demanded if to be worked on.
The breakthrough material here is tin. While the early metallurgical developments we have outlined can be primarily traced to the region around West Asia / Near East, tin was scarce. It was ultimately sourced from as far as present-day Afghanistan in the East and Cornwall, Great Britain in the West. And that changed everything! - it was around this stated region, in particular Mesopotamia,2 about 5500 years ago, where this new alloyed material first came of age - it was now the Bronze Age!
A Material Change
Why did it change everything? I think we know the answer intuitively. Metal is superior to stone in so many ways. It can be molded into all sorts of shapes unlike stone. It offers several properties including strength and durability, precision and versatility, castability and repairability, and even a certain aesthetic appeal. It was this that enabled the fabrication of wheels, with just stone tools, the transition from cylindrical logs to precise wheels, initially solid and later spoked, as we outlined in the previous episode, would probably never have happened.
It led to the development of more advanced implements in agriculture - the plows that entailed superior practices in farming. Over and above the wheel aspect mentioned, it led to further improvements as we’ll see in transportation components. And of course, it led to the development of weaponry, once again affording its users far greater effectiveness on the battlefield compared to people running towards them with sticks and stones!
All this led to massive economic, social and political changes. It led to the beginning of civilization: the emergence of cities, large urban centers with sophisticated social and political organization buttressed on such a technological underpinning.
And it led to the beginning of history: some of the earliest big names of kings and rulers we know: from Hammurabi to the Pharaohs of Egypt to Sargon of Akkad. It spawned the first major kingdoms and empires: the Sumerians, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, the Mitanni, the Minoans, and, among others, the Indus Valley Civilization.
But this doesn’t even mention the most influential of them all, for by strange irony, the one Bronze-Age force that had the most far-reaching impact on history (and geography and more!), the one that perhaps more successfully integrated the technologies we’ve covered in the last 2-3 episodes, somehow this force has gone under the radar of history. Now that we’ve looked at the horse, the wheel and bronze, we are finally ready to tell their tale!
Audio and images generated by AI
Now we know how he got his name (and how obsessed I am with alliteration!
Roughly also where both the development of agriculture and the wheel took place
This was fascinating! We are spending next summer in Cornwall, and I knew about the tin mines there and how influential they were in ancient human history. But I hadn't thought about the mindset that takes the innovation of firing pottery and then expands that refining ore. This series is really helping me envision how human brains work that leads us to these technological innovations.
As a technical note, I think that building pots using the coil method significantly predates throwing them on a wheel. And I also think basketry might predate pottery, especially since baskets are way better for nomads and require less complex technology. So my hunch is that the idea of creating a container for water or food started with hollowed out pieces of wood, progressed to baskets, then to pots. What do you think?