REVERSE ENGINEERING IRON AGE TECHNOLOGY QUESTION

The key to reverse engineering steel is to be able to identify that iron (1% +/-) had been added to it to form an alloy. The technology to do so was unavailable during that period and has only been available in the last couple of centuries to my knowledge. Perhaps if our man happened upon several smelt iron samples coupled with raw alloy materials laying around, and associated the extra hard sample as being the one next to the powdered coal, he might figure it out. But, that isn't exactly reverse engineering.

No, not without a lot of extra help because part of the dividing line between the neolithic and the bronze age is the development of metal working. Unless this person is living right on the dividing line between the eras, the technology to meaningfully work metal period is nascent to non-existent, and you're a few intermediary processes away from the technology for working iron, much less steel.

If you as a modern person who's grown up surrounded by metal can't figure out how to make steel, then how can a neolithic person who's had no experience of metal whatsoever be able to figure it out? It's not an instinctive process at all. You have to smelt iron ore to get iron (steel is an alloy that's mostly iron), i.e. heat up iron ore and carbon in a furnace to a very high temperature. There's a chemical reaction that happens (only at a very high temperature) and iron is one of the products of the reaction. If you smelt iron ore, then let it all cool down, you get lumps of iron. These would then have to be melted/softened down and shaped into tools using a blacksmith's techniques.

The iron age came much later than the bronze age. The bronze age started when people realised they could mix copper and tin to make bronze, which makes good tools. Copper and tin are native metals (i.e. they are found in their metal form in nature) and were used as jewellery in the late neolithic era (sometimes called the chalcolithic era). You can also get them by smelting the appropriate ores. Smelting was probably discovered by accident, i.e. in fires used for some other purpose that happened to have charcoal (carbon) and copper/tin ore (malachite and cassiterite) in them. Copper and tin aren't very good for tool making, so even when people were using them for jewellery, the main tools (knives, axes) had stone blades, hence it being still technically the neolithic era (even the name chalcolithic stil includes "lithic" meaning stone). When bronze was first made, the result was blades that were better than stone blades* - hence the dawn of the bronze age. The iron age came much later, probably because iron needs to be smelted at a significantly higher temperature than copper and tin. I don't know when people started mixing iron with carbon to make steel. But a late neolithic/chalcolithic person won't jump from "hey if you heat this bit of copper you can make a cool think you can wear around your neck" to reverse-engineering steel just from looking at steel.

*personally, I made a stone hand axe that was so basic it would be equivalent to early lower palaeolithic and found it was better than a steel blade for opening things like cardboard boxes and removing plastic tags off things, but for most things metal blades are better. Bizarrely, there's a trend for using ceramic blades for cooking nowadays. It's like human technology's gone full circle.

ETA: my knowledge of things after the upper palaeolithic era's a bit shaky so if someone's got a more accurate account of how the bronze age started then go with what they say. It remains the case that the iron age started a long time after the bronze age though, and you have a lot of different things that were developed before the very first use of metal and the ability to make iron.

Hey Cowboy,

Building on what neandermagnon has said:

neandermagnon said:

. When bronze was first made, the result was blades that were better than stone blades* - hence the dawn of the bronze age. The iron age came much later, probably because iron needs to be smelted at a significantly higher temperature than copper and tin. I don't know when people started mixing iron with carbon to make steel.

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Somewhere I heard that the 'threshold technology' to be able to extract iron from ore was forced draft onto a charcoal (not wood) fire, as a way to get it hot enough. That's just iron--steel is another jump beyond.

Techs

To a neolithic person, a steel blade would be magical: beyond any technology available to them. It would be equally prized as a sharp blade and as a shiny object in which you can see a 'face' or reflection. A knowledgeable neolith should be able to keep the blade sharp. He/she would have great prestige and the object would be envied and desired by others., or worshipped.

Everything humans have discovered, at least before scientific hypothesising was created, was by accident, or by simply just observing some natural act and reproducing it. I can imagine a child in a bow and arrow society wrapping a stick around the string and then rotating it back and forth -- just for amusement -- when all of sudden smoke appears. An adult see that and bam, a new way to make fire. Man has always had an imagination -- witness the 40,000+ "gods" on planet Earth -- but it is only when possibilities are imagined or discovered that the imagination can be expanded to create reality.

FWIW
DrDoc

I wasn't aware that Bronze Age was pre-warfare.

I did a search and it wasn't. There are all sorts of hits for Bronze age warfare.

Yeah, war existed before Bronze

Conflict is always with us.
The big question is, did Early Man first use a rock to kill an animal, and realize that it could be used to kill another human, or first use a rock to kill another human then realize that it could be used to kill an animal as well?

As for fire, they may not even have used a bow - given a soft wood that grinds easily, rubbing a fire-hardened wooden point, hard and fast, over a piece of soft wood (perhaps in an effort to make a groove or a hole) might have been enough to start a fire.

Creative Cowboy said:

You are correct. I am referring to pre-Bronze Age (read above). The archaeological evidence suggests that while isolated violence did occur, it was not on the scale of tribal warfare until the advent of Bronze weapons.

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This is correct. Unfortunately, it's not commonly believed to be true, due to a lot of prevalent myths about prehistoric people.

I had a big discussion about this in SYW ages and ages ago, regarding a story set 35,000 years ago/upper palaeolithic. It was put forward as a point of critique that the elders of the tribe wouldn't have chastised my MC for getting into a fight with another boy, instead they would've considered the boy my MC beat up to be worthless on account of being too weak, etc - however this kind of die hard warrior attitude (raising boys to be warriors) isn't that likely pre-bronze age.

(note this post isn't directed as a reply to you specifically just getting the explanation out there as to why warfare's a bronze age and onwards thing)

Modern hunter-gatherers aren't warriors and aren't all that violent (though you do get one-on-one fights to the death sometimes) and don't raise their boys in that way so I don't see why ancient hunter-gatherers would've done, when they had way more land that they could've moved to in order to avoid competition for resources with other tribes* than modern hunter-gatherers.

*if there's no conflict for resources why on earth would they want to fight?

Note: warfare and violence aren't the same thing. Warfare: one group (tribe, city state, nation, whatever) raising an army to fight another. Warrior: someone that's trained to fight, as opposed to someone who's trained to hunt and/or farm who will defend him or herself when attacked. Hunter-gatherers are raised to be hunters and/or gatherers. If they fight back when attacked, it doesn't make them warriors. Ditto farmers using farming tools as makeshift weapons when attacked. Warrior weapons are made for the purpose of killing enemy warriors. If it's made for hunting animals but used against humans because you had a squabble, it's not a warrior weapon.

People have always got into fights with other people, sometimes to the death. Sometimes resulting in vendettas and the like. But with small populations (as you'd find in hunter-gatherer populations and small agricultural settlements, which all early neolithic settlements would've been), raising an army and sending them to fight another group to the death is going to mean the end of your population as if lots of men die fighting, who's going to be left to hunt? (Or farm, in the case of a small, neolithic settlement.) Raising an army only becomes possible when you have enough men that you can afford to lose most of them and still have enough keep the settlement and population going. And populations that big didn't really arise until the bronze age.

There may have been the occasional late neolithic settlement big enough but even then, did they have actual war weapons? It wouldn't be the case that one day people woke up and said "we have bronze now, lets make weapons and have a war" - more like as neighbouring populations grew in size and pressure on resources increased - once you have agriculture you are tied to a particular bit of land and have more to fight for, while hunter-gatherers can just follow the herds of animals and move away from such competition - tensions between neighbouring populations increased and therefore conflict happened. The need to defend the growing population and the land you're farming = need to start raising boys to be warriors = need to start making war weapons rather than just using agricultural tools and hunting weapons, etc etc etc. This would've developed over time, not suddenly. But not until you have large agricultural settlements and a lot of pressure/competition for resources, i.e. bronze age.

frimble3 said:

Conflict is always with us.
The big question is, did Early Man first use a rock to kill an animal, and realize that it could be used to kill another human, or first use a rock to kill another human then realize that it could be used to kill an animal as well?

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Early humans didn't first use rocks to kill animals or humans. Chimps use stones to crack nuts. They also hunt small mammals without using any weapons*. They also throw rocks at things (chimps or other animals) to drive them away. These behaviours likely predated the last common ancestor of chimps, bonobos and humans. Common chimps sometimes kill other chimps (usually male chimps killing males from other groups that wander inadvertently into their territory). Again, the common ancestors of humans, bonobos and chimps likely did the same thing.

*although there is one hunting method used by some chimps where they use a pointy stick to spear bush babies

The first manufactured stone tools (i.e. stones modified to make tools) were made by australopithecus before humans evolved (shortly before, because it's this that appears to have set them on the trajectory to becoming human.) Their purpose appears to have been for butchering animal carcasses, specifically for extracting brains and bone marrow. There is debate regarding whether the large animals butchered in this way were hunted or scavenged.

I don't doubt that the first australopithecus to be killed by an australopithecus with a stone tool didn't happen much later than the invention of the first stone tool, but the purpose of the tool was to butcher animal carcasses. And much more recently (for me, as a palaeoanthropology nerd) there's a Neandertal who was killed by another human (most likely a Neandertal not a Homo sapiens, despite what some people say*) who died as a result of someone throwing a spear at him - the spear was a hunting weapon. It was not designed to kill people. Neandertals didn't live in big enough numbers to be able to afford to kill each other on a regular basis. Whatever caused one person to throw a spear at this poor Neandertal, it probably wasn't anything trivial.

*some people say that because the spear was thrown, it must've been thrown by a Homo sapiens because Neandertals didn't make throwing spears... but just because it wasn't a throwing spear, doesn't mean it's not possible to be thrown... a brick isn't designed to be thrown but you can still throw a brick at someone and accidentally (or deliberately) kill them in the process.

In any case, early human technology's purpose wasn't to kill humans.

As for fire, they may not even have used a bow - given a soft wood that grinds easily, rubbing a fire-hardened wooden point, hard and fast, over a piece of soft wood (perhaps in an effort to make a groove or a hole) might have been enough to start a fire.

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Controlled use of fire dates back to the middle palaeolithic era (in fact it defines the start of the middle palaeolithic). Bows and arrows weren't used until the upper palaeolithic era, i.e. much, much later.

Personally, I think using flint and iron pyrite to make sparks probably predates friction methods, given that humans have been bashing various rocks against pieces of flint since before humans even evolved. All it would take is for someone to use a bit of iron pyrite (or similar rock with a high enough iron content) as a hammerstone when working the flint and then notice that it makes sparks, and when the sparks catch on dried grass/leaves/etc they start to burn. Such rocks were likely highly valued by middle palaeolithic people for their ability to make sparks. It's harder to say when wood friction methods could've started, because wooden tools don't usually survive in the fossil record so the development of wooden tools is harder to trace. At any point when wood would've been rubbed against wood while making wooden tools it could've been discovered by accident (exactly as you suggest). It's hard to say which happened first as the archaeological record doesn't show much of the development of wooden tools, which is a shame. Given the other things middle palaeolithic people could do (tan hides, start fires and haft stone blades onto wooden spear shafts) it's likely they did make wooden tools as well.

Creative Cowboy said:

Even with a nascent Bronze Age, working metal with heat, I do not know how Steel could be reverse engineered. As DrDoc states, a steel object would be revered as an object of veneration and power, which it is in my WiP. I am trying to understand the diffusion of technology outside the primary social group in my world, without relying on recipe sharing. A culture that would have the premier ability to make steel is a culture that would grow wealthy on trade.

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And.... back on topic... (apologies for the derail, I could nerd out on these topics all day...)

I think early people did rely on sharing information. I know the theory and a simple practical method for smelting copper because someone showed me how to do it (a chemistry teacher in a science lab). I can transfer that knowledge to a more bronze age setting, e.g. open fire outdoors and not using modern tools, but the method's basically the same and I know it because someone taught me. I know how to smelt iron because I watched a you tube video. For that matter, I only know how to do the palaeolithic technologies that I know how to do because someone's shown me how to do them (lots of you tube videos and documentaries as well as real life (i.e. not TV etc) demonstration. Even middle palaeolithic technology is extremely hard to learn without someone teaching you.

If you want people to learn to do stuff without being taught directly, then maybe one group spying on another to see how it's done?

Greek fire springs to mind... a napalm-like weapon from hundreds of years ago. The recipe was lost (I think it was kept as a closely guarded secret... so closely guarded it was lost altogether) and modern scientists are struggling to recreate it exactly.

Discovery by accident or trial and error is the only other way to learn stuff besides learning from other humans. The more complex the technology, the harder it is to figure out using trial and error. There is nothing about steel that says "I'm made this way" the way you can figure out that a middle palaeolithic spear was made by hafting a stone blade to a wooden spear using animal sinew and some kind of glue - even then knowing how to shape the flint blade, how to make the glue and how to prepare the animal sinew to make it able to be used like cord - that's extremely challenging without someone telling you how to do it. But with a piece of steel - you can't see smelting from it, you can't see what it's made of... you can't just look at it and break it down to its components.

Neandermagnon, you are a storehouse of fascinating information. Somewhat on topic, if these people were iron-age people, knew how to smelt iron and shape it, if the magic guy who brings steel brought them a laminated blade, might the light/dark lines suggest 'layer in something dark, like, say, charcoal?'
(And thank you for the previous post - I was thinking 'flint and steel' - but they've got flint, but no steel. You say an iron pyrite or similar high iron-content rock would work, and, as you said, if you're working flint with it, the sparks would be noticeable. Once again, I bow to your wisdom and experience.

I'm not knowledgeable about paleolithic peoples, but the Mori of NZ and the pan-Pacific peoples seemed to have warrior classes. I think they are stone age. I think economics needs to be considered. If you hunting and gathering, a lot of time is spent doing that, hence less time for warring. Note: time = food. I met tribes in Borneo that practiced slash and burn agriculture and did hunting and gathering. But the upland rice they grew provided a lot of calories to spend rime doing other things. They were former headhunters, which is not the same thing as warfare. Collecting a head was gaining the 'power' of that person. An analogy would be getting a high school athletic letter, I think: you gain prestige.

DrDoc said:

I'm not knowledgeable about paleolithic peoples, but the Mori of NZ and the pan-Pacific peoples seemed to have warrior classes. I think they are stone age.

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The Mauri and various other pacific islander peoples were/are agriculturalists. I don't know what level of technology they had when the Europeans arrived. They did have a warrior culture. The difference between being a hunter-gatherer and an agriculturalist is much more relevant with regards to whether you have a warrior culture or not, than the presence/absence of metal (though metal gives you a big advantage in making war weapons). As an agriculturalist, you have land, crops and a settlement to defend. If no-one started using metal, it doesn't mean that the other developments we associate with the bronze age (larger city states, armies, warriors, development of other trades) won't have happened.

Compare with Native Australians and Tazmanians who were hunter-gatherers and had no concept of warfare in their culture at all* and their only weapons were designed for hunting animals. They were subjected to genocide by the European colonialists which they had no way to fight back from, which is so beyond horrific I can't even begin to find words to describe it.

*interpersonal violence existed of course, but while two people can fight each other with weapons designed for hunting kangaroos, they can't fight off a whole army that had guns

NZ, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa are great rugby nations. They take "beat the colonials at their own game" very seriously. (NZ has a mix of Mauri and European-descended players and a strong Mauri influence including the Haka which Mauri players brought into the game more than 100 years ago, afaik.) No, I still haven't got over England women being beaten by NZ in the world cup last month. (Kudos to NZ who played amazingly though, they deserved to win, England played well but NZ played better.) Fiji men's 7s team won the Olympics - also beating England in the final. While NZ have the Haka, the other pacific island teams have their own version of the Haka, i.e. from their own cultures which they have also adopted into rugby.

Admittedly, I know more about pacific island cultures from rugby than anything else...

I think economics needs to be considered. If you hunting and gathering, a lot of time is spent doing that, hence less time for warring. Note: time = food.

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Definitely economics makes a huge difference. Agriculture caused some massive shifts in human society. The need to defend land/crops and settlements leading to warriors and war is just one thing. The ability to accumulate wealth led to more inequality in society (rich/poor, social class etc), and also sexism arose in agricultural societies where women's ability to contribute economically was limited by pregnancy and looking after small children. (In most hunter-gatherer societies, women obtain a significant proportion of the food by gathering, while pregnant and with small children in tow. However, you can't be a warrior or do heavy work on the farm while pregnant or looking after small kids, so where there's less ability for women to contribute economically, their status in society falls.)

Also, agriculture is a more precarious way of life... if your crop fails you could be looking at a long period of famine. Whereas if the hunt fails a hunter-gatherer only goes hungry for a day or so, and if the animals move way, they go follow them. There are interesting differences in religion/spiritual beliefs between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, with more rigid superstition in the latter. Human sacrifice is probably what comes to mind (hunter-gatherers have no motivation whatsoever to do anything like that, but agriculturalists who feel at the mercy of harsh gods who punish them by making their crops die do) but also some of the very rigid rules/beliefs in modern religion date back to the neolithic and bronze age.

I'm not saying all agriculturalists were harsh, superstitious, male chauvinists. The degree to which these things exist in various societies (all, not just agriculturalists) does seem to depend on economic factors. More precarious/higher likelihood of crops failing/having no food = harsher, more rigidly superstitious religion. Less ability for women to contribute economically = lower status of women. Ability to accumulate wealth = rich/poor/social class inequality, etc.

All the above information is looking at general trends. There is massive variation between human societies and there are many other factors besides the above that affect different societies' behaviour and attitudes. You can usually find economic reasons why things are the way they are in any society (including our own) and why things change over time (including the shift from agricultural to industrial).

I met tribes in Borneo that practiced slash and burn agriculture and did hunting and gathering. But the upland rice they grew provided a lot of calories to spend rime doing other things. They were former headhunters, which is not the same thing as warfare. Collecting a head was gaining the 'power' of that person. An analogy would be getting a high school athletic letter, I think: you gain prestige.

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I don't know what a high school athletic letter is. It's not something that happens in Britain. Is it like getting a blue at Oxford or Cambridge?

Yeah having discussed the downside of agriculture, the upside is it leads to larger populations (it gives the ability to sustain a larger population on less land) and not needing to have so many people spending so much time just getting food, which then leads to the emergence of trades and people finding different ways to make a living, specialising in what they're good at (making stuff, specialising in trades, etc) rather than everyone spending time hunting and/or gathering and making things on the side. There are massive advantages to agriculture otherwise it wouldn't have been taken on so widely.


ETA: I don't have a huge amount of knowledge about various modern peoples (modern for me is anything in the last 35,000 years or so) albeit that I did learn about general trends like those listed above at uni, plus studying a few modern hunter-gatherer societies but the main focus was on human evolution and the palaeolithic era. There has to be some caution with regards to how much similarity there is between modern hunter-gatherers and ancient hunter-gatherers because change and development in society is ongoing and just because a culture never bothered with agriculture (or never used metals or whatever) doesn't mean they didn't continue to develop in other ways. Also going back on topic, there are modern hunter-gatherers that use metal, albeit trading for it rather than smelting it themselves. People are highly versatile and adapt their way of life to what's needed and what's available. So even if you have a fictional neolithic city that comes across metal through whatever means they do in the OP's story, while it's implausible that they could reverse engineer it and it's likely they'd consider it to be magical in some way, they almost certainly would find a use for it, so it's value would be far more than just being considered magical. If it's useful and they can't make it, then it's going to be extremely valuable.

frimble3 said:

Neandermagnon, you are a storehouse of fascinating information.

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Thanks I think prehistory needs to be taught a lot better in schools etc. Aside from the obvious thing of knowing about the origins of our species and culture, it explains a lot about why things are the way they are.

Somewhat on topic, if these people were iron-age people, knew how to smelt iron and shape it, if the magic guy who brings steel brought them a laminated blade, might the light/dark lines suggest 'layer in something dark, like, say, charcoal?'

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The question to ask first is whether you'd be able to make the connection, even knowing what you know. The less you know, the harder it is to make connections.

Some legends about magic swords are thought to come from times when someone accidentally got just the right amount of carbon in when smelting iron, so it was more like a steel sword than an iron sword, but they were unable to replicate it, not being able to identify what was different when it was made. Hence the emergence of magic sword legends. Given that, I'm not sure someone would be able to reverse engineer something brought to them by a fictional magic guy. More likely this magic guy would feature in their legends for generations to come.

(And thank you for the previous post - I was thinking 'flint and steel' - but they've got flint, but no steel. You say an iron pyrite or similar high iron-content rock would work, and, as you said, if you're working flint with it, the sparks would be noticeable. Once again, I bow to your wisdom and experience.

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Yeah I've seen a demonstration of starting a fire with flint and iron pyrite. You get quite impressive sparks and it's not hard to start a fire from it (it's easier than friction methods), if you have dry grass/leaves or similar. Flint and steel works better (from a modern survivalist point of view) and in the modern world, old steel is easier to find than iron pyrite. Just in case we get caught in a zombie apocalypse.

Ultimately, someone did make the transition from iron to steel. Whether it was a single person or a lineage of blacksmiths with each trying to outdo their predecessor or something else I have no idea. When a sword was made, its maker was known. If a harder iron-steel hybrid sword was made by accident and the sword became respected, then the smith would most likely get feedback and try and re-do what had been done before.

something else came to mind this afternoon. Okay, we have an iron age person with a steel blade. Thought it may seem like magic and be revered, I think all ages have skeptics and non-believers. An iron smith will recognize the blade as "metal", though not iron. Having seen that, his view is changed about "metal" just being iron, and he could be moved to see what he can do.....

Hello, I just wanted to weigh in with an opinion here and some relevant facts. I'll try to avoid being too technical since I am an inorganic chemist and work with metals all the time. I just wanted to bring up a few practical aspects you should consider.

To start with, there are more barriers to a bronze age smith forging steel than just knowing to add charcoal to iron. First off, the bronze age smith does not have a forge capable of working iron. There's a 500 degree difference in melting points which requires a huge step up in making the forge itself. Going all the way up to crucible steel (which is what Ulfbehrt swords were made of) requires going even hotter. Second, you need the tools to work iron, which are different from the relatively soft tools you can work bronze with. Third, you need to be able to mine and smelt iron, which is again significantly harder than mining and smelting the copper and tin needed to make bronze. It requires a much hotter smelter, different prospecting techniques, and different mining methods (I won't go into detail here). Forging and working iron also require some specialized skills that a bronze age smith simply wouldn't have, like quenching and tempering. I could go on but I think I've made the point.

So with all these barrier, I do have a suggestion: have the bronze age guys steal a forge from whoever made the steel and reverse engineer from that. It would have all the tools, the right forge, and probably even the equipment they would need to smelt the iron. From there they would just have to work out how to find and mine iron. Iron pellets found in meteorites were found and used in jewelry even before the bronze age, so all it would take is for someone to make that connection and then decide to look for stone similar to the meteor it came from.