nowhere in the article do they claim its the oldest iron...

they just had a theory that copper processing lead to discoveries in iron processing.

the evidence they found seems to support that.

theyre not claiming this particular site is where the iron age started. and it has nothing to do with what some people in india did. Maybe they too discovered iron processing through a similar process. and i dont understand what racial things your bringing up..

"they just had a theory that copper processing lead to discoveries in iron processing."

Is there any theory how it could have been any different?

It sounds obvious, that advances in metal working comes from those working with metals and not from carpet makers.

They found ancient inhabitants of Georgia using iron ore as flux for copper smelting, so it's a theory of how they went from one to the other. It's not terribly exciting but it beats "they tried smelting rocks at random to see if anything good would happen".

Smelting random rocks (with fairly distinct appearances) sounds like a very logical thing to do. I would say it's a natural human impulse to experiment with random stuff and see what happens, that's curiosity.

What sound highly improbable is someone having access to this obviously different ore (used as a flux) but never thinking of smelting it.

i have zero background in this topic.. but if i were to guess there are >100x more ceramic kilns than there are bronze smelters

if some people chucked random ores into ceramic kilns, maybe one would get out some iron slag and then iterate from there

theres a great blog series about making iron.

https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

its easy on paper, but when you get into the details its actually tricky

Having been a kid living in a place that had open fires burning (new houses were under construction and the builders often made fires to get rid of scrap materials), I can say that the desire in the primitive mind to throw random things into a roaring fire to see what happens, is strong.

This discovery is only of interest because the Iron-Age, as per standard-theory, started around 1200 BC. in the Caucuses/Anatolia or the near-East - which fits with another theory which claims that this allowed the "Aryans" to invade India with their technological superiority around this same time and replace the (dark-skinned) natives genetically.

(Note: the above is obviously a caricature, but current versions of theory don't change the structure, only the emphasis on "race").

No one would care about a copper-smelt site from 500 BC.; nor would they care about this one if the Indian archaeological claims were accepted (but that one also destroys centuries of Western history-making about India, and all the social-theories that depend on it).

This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread. For more information on how 'race' was ingested into Indology, I'd refer the interested reader to the excellent book by Adluri/Bagchi [0].

[0] https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/120/3/1132/197...

> This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread

You want to say your piece and get no back-chat?

Romans started to hit people with iron swords at a certain date, influencing the history of Europe substantially, so the origin of that iron age is interesting. Elsewhere, a copper smelting site of 500 BC would be interesting: consider the Moche, in Peru, who independently had a sort of bronze age around that time while Europe was into iron. (I don't think they did anything much with their bronze because they were too preoccupied with body fluids and erotic pottery.)

Just out of curiosity, what was their deal with their precious bodily fluids? Some Dr Strangelove type paranoia? Or just a usual Friday at a swingers club?

It was all about the irrigation, apparently. It's vital to keep life-giving fluids in your irrigation canal, and by extension also in your body, otherwise you're a loser. Something along those lines.

Extremely rare meteoric iron, yes. So, not a historically significant iron age. Neat and all, but not a big cultural upheaval, making one dagger.

>Way before your Roman Empire

Lmao the one-sided cucumber measuring going on in this whole comment chain.

Like one whole side is interested in talking about the origins of certain _types_ of metalworking and the other is more interested in chest-beating about the technicalities of who did it first.