Anonymous #2 3w

Also the thing about copper in North America is trueish. North America has a very old tradition of copper use due to pure deposits around the Great Lakes. BUT they were hammering copper not smelting it. Because it was so pure there was no need to smelt and this also meant alloying never locally developed so you never got bronze around the Great Lakes. Copper tool use declined due to a shift towards it being for ceremonial items and due to greater availability of hard stones.

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Anonymous #2 3w

Do look up the cucuteni-trypallia culture though they’re cool. A very large settled society in what is now the Moldova-Ukraine-Romania area which were there when the yamnaya arrived and mixed with them. Some of the largest cities on earth at the time.

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Anonymous #2 3w

Ohmy b I thought the Yamnaya were originally from the Sea of Azov area probably a little too far north west

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Anonymous #2 3w

Do we know what caused the shift away from tool use? Was the high purity of the native deposits a hindrance in the material properties or smn?

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Anonymous OP 3w

Copper just isn’t that great for tools. Like it’s useable but if you have access to high quality stone copper is about the same or worse in comparison. So once trade networks brought good stones from farther away, it became more economical to use copper, which was increasingly a status symbol, for jewelry or decorative plates or other high-status items.

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Anonymous #2 3w

In Eurasia and in Mesoamerica they didn’t have much pure copper, so in order to extract it they learned to smelt. Smelting enabled the accidental discovery of alloys, which is how Mesoamerica and Eurasia got bronze. Bronze is harder than pure copper so is therefore more useful compared to stone.

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Anonymous #2 3w

So while copper use was discovered in North America at about the same time as in Eurasia, Eurasia ended up developing bronzes while North America didn’t. And the development of smelting in Eurasia would enable the later discovery of iron.

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Anonymous OP 3w

They weren’t smelting they had natural access to pure copper so they just hammered it into form

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