50,000+ BCE–1000 BCE: (From Ceramics to Metallurgy, the Second Major Line of Technological Advance Growing Directly Out of the Foundational Pyrotechnology of…

50,000+ BCE–1000 BCE: (From Ceramics to Metallurgy, the Second Major Line of Technological Advance Growing Directly Out of the Foundational Pyrotechnology of Early Ceramic Production, the Connection Between Firing Clay and Smelting Ore, People in Several Different Parts of the World Independently Bringing Metallurgy into Existence, and Copper as the First Important Metal Because Its Melting Point Falls in the Same Range as Temperatures Generated in Ceramic Baking): Ceramic production was not the only area of early African technological invention. A second major line of early technological advance in ancient world history, fundamental for modern technology, grew directly out of the foundational pyrotechnology of ceramic production. People in several different parts of the world independently brought metallurgy into existence as a second transformative technology of the ancient eras. And the connection between the two is not coincidental. It is surely not accidental, Ehret observes, that each separate region of the world with early smelting of metals from ores was a region where ceramic technology had previously been established. Having ceramics meant that people in those regions were already well acquainted with the capacity of fire to change the chemical composition of earthen matter. Metallurgy expanded that understanding, but in a new direction. It applied fire and heat not to reshape the chemistry of earthen matter as nature had constituted it but rather to break that matter down chemically, to separate out parts of it and then form the extracted material into new kinds of cultural items. In different parts of the world, copper tended to become the most important early metal to be exploited, partly because of its malleability and perhaps for another telling reason: its melting point, 1,085 degrees Celsius, falls in the same range as the temperatures often generated in the baking of early ceramic wares. The women who invented ceramics, in other words, had already been working at the temperatures that would eventually make metallurgy possible.