Page 36 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

4: Metals through
the ages
Metals are used so widely today that you may not realise that for much of prehistory people hardly used metals at all. Metals were much harder to work than wood and could not be obtained in such large amounts as stone.
The first metals to be used were native metals such as gold and copper. But these metals are
soft and have limited uses. All other metals had to be extracted from rock, and this proved
a challenge that could not be overcome for thousands of years.
For these reasons metals were first used sparingly and largely for their decorative effects. The attractive appearance of gold and silver made them desirable as jewellery, but copper also found a use as shields and swords. As other metals were discovered, a wider and wider range of applications were found for them, new metals often replacing the ones used previously for the same task. In this chapter we describe just a few of the vast number of uses to which metals have been put through history and the way that changes in metal technology affected them.
Early metalworking
Mankind’s use of metal stretches back nearly 7,000 years. The first metals to be used were native gold, silver, and copper, in part because they were easy to work and also because they were easy to recognise in the ground. Gold was probably first noticed as nuggets in riverbeds. Silver occurs more often as veins. Copper can occur as large pieces among rocks.
(Above) Gold was used earlier than any other known metal.
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