• What is the Age of metals?
• How does the Age of Metals start?
• Metal Age Characteristics
• Stages of the Metals Age

We explain what the Metal Age was, how it began, its characteristics and stages. Also, how each metal was used.

The Metal Age does not only involve the use of metal, but its smelting.

What is the Age of metals?

When talking about the Metal Age, it is commonly included both the Bronze Age as to the Iron age, in a single historical period. It is logically characterized by the beginning of the management of metals and metallurgy by the humanity.

This marks the end of the call Stone age, at the end of the Neolithic period. So the Age of Metals extends from 6,000 BC. and the year 1,000 a. C., approximately, thus marking the end of the prehistory.

As with other prehistoric classifications, we must note that this time frame is established in conventional terms, as a simplification of work, and is not a truth scientific, since the civilizational processes occurred in a very different way depending on the geographic region to which we refer.

That is why the Metal Age is often thought of as a classification of European and Asian prehistory, since there were civilizations that barely knew metallurgy, such as the native American natives.

How does the Age of Metals start?

When humanity began to melt metal, it was already leading a sedentary life.

The Metal Age begins in a diffuse time. The first evidence of casting of the copper they are dated around the year 5,000 a. C. and are the first records of the consciousness of handling metal. This happened in Europe in the Balkans, in the middle of the 5th millennium BC. C., and spread throughout the continent for the next several centuries.

At that time, most of humanity led a sedentary existence, sustained by the farming, and from the Neolithic period, hammered metals were used in daily life, so that it is really their smelting that characterizes this new civilizational stage.

Metal Age Characteristics

Bronze was still in use in Mesopotamia when writing was invented.

In theory, the Metal Age is governed by the logic of the discovery of new and better minerals, which replace each other as humanity learns to forge better tools with them: weapons, shields, armor, utensils of all kinds, etc. Thus, copper is the first to be used, then bronze and finally iron.

However, the Metal Age was not only a period of discovery of the steel industry, but also encompassed enormous civilizational and cultural discoveries. Among them, in some regions writing was already used, so that in those regions it is difficult to apply this distinction between the Metal Age and the actual entrance to the History ancient.

For example, in the Mesopotamia and Egypt, the first forms of writing were developed at the same time that bronze was widely used. However, the substitution by iron never took place, since said element it was rare in the region. Instead, in the Africa Sub-Saharan Africa went directly to the handling of iron without first knowing copper and bronze.

Therefore, what we usually understand by the Age of Metals is different for each particular region, rather than constituting a universal criterion in the history of mankind.

Stages of the Metals Age

The use of iron gave advantages to the cultures that could use it.

The stages of the Metal Age are distinguished from each other by the predominant metallic element, although, as we have seen, some regions were already abundant in some and lacking in others. These stages are:

• Copper or Chalcolithic Age. Copper was one of the first metals known to mankind, used in its native state, molded by hammering and cold beating, until later the possibility of melting it was discovered. Later, thanks to the discovery of ceramics, it was melted and alloyed with other elements, such as arsenic and later with tin, the latter very important because it gave rise to bronze. In this period, with fuzzy boundaries between the end of the Neolithic (around 6,500 BC) and the beginning of the Bronze Age (around 3,000 BC).
• Bronze Age. Thanks to the discovery of the alloy From copper, arose one of the most widely used and most versatile metals at that time: bronze, whose importance in the manufacture of tools, weapons, vessels, plates, utensils and ornaments was immense. In this period, in addition, the first systems of proto-writing or ideograms are given, depending on the region of the planet. Its limits, established approximately, mark the beginning around 3,000 BC. C. (although already in the Near East it was used for almost a thousand years) and its end at the beginning of the Iron Age, more or less in 1,500 a. C.
• Iron age. The substitution of bronze, a relatively soft metal, for the hardness of iron gave the advantage in many situations to civilizations that developed in geographies where this material was abundant. In fact, iron is the most sophisticated form of metallurgy in Prehistory, and they made it a coveted and exquisite material at the time, displacing bronze as a solely decorative mineral. This period begins with the end of the Bronze Age in 1,500 BC. C. approximately, and ends at different times depending on the region and civilization, with the entry into History proper after the invention of writing, which happened in Europe around 550 BC C.