Earlier or not, I think there's good evidence that West Africans came up with iron smelting on their own.

Iron artifacts in WF appear earlier than in North or East Africa, which means they had figured out ironworking before the technology diffused to their neighbors from the Near East. Researchers have also noted that their processes and furnace design are quite different.

West African smiths also seemed unaware of the process of quench hardening until much later, despite having "steel" (iron with high enough carbon content to harden through quenching). Even up to the 19th century, many tribal smiths in West Africa were observed hardening the edges of iron/steel blades and tools by work hardening instead of quenching. In contrast, quenching and tempering techniques were widely used in the East Mediterranean by at least 800 BCE, and knowledge of the process seemed to have spread alongside general iron smelting when it diffused to other regions of Europe/Asia. Hence, the lack of quench hardening among the West African iron-working tradition is good evidence that iron smelting technology may not have diffused to them (at least not from the Near East), but independently developed.

>the bolsheviks, run by Vladimir Lenin, who want a very orthodox form of Marxism,

That's an anachronistic way of describing it. Leninism only becomes orthodoxy because of the success of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Yes, i know, this is literally the point i am making.

Modern blacksmiths do not make crucial items, they make, again, "neat to have" items. Nobody needs stuff made by hand by a blacksmith, because if you need the item, then it will be made cheaper by industrial methods.

So, i am not describing blackmithing for thousands of years. I am describing the place blacksmithing has in our modern, current society, which is a very niche trade, with very few customers. The only way for nearly all blacksmiths is either making bespoke items for rich people, assuming the smith has managed to make a name for themselves, or by making trinkets to sell at markets.

So a very small percentage of them are making a living, and an even smaller portion is "making bank".

And no, they did not "use to" burn down buildings with the express purpose of getting the nails. Buildings burning would always carry the risk of spreading the fire, which carries with it both material costs, and possibly cost of lives. Possibly in situations where houses had burned down, they would sift through the ashes for the nails, or if the entire building was enough of a wreck to leave the nails as the only part worth salvaging.

Aside from a few "i've heard stories of" i can find no sources to back the claim that houses were burned for this purpose, and having made nails by hand myself, i can tell you that it's not time consuming nor difficult. It is one of the first items i was taught to make while studying blacksmithing, and by the end of a week i was able to reliably make two or three nails in one "heat". This means that an absolute beginner can make 2-3 nails every minute, and a skilled nail maker could make twice that.

Good wood was also valuable, and if the house was in good enough shape that the nails were still of use, so would the wood have been.

As for dead as a doornail, it's not called dead because old nails were used for them, it's because when you make a staple out of it, the nail can't move. You deaden it. It's because the door would be a "soft" entry point into a building, and would have to be made sturdy in order to not break.

Finally, no, items made now are not worse than ones made by hand. The hinges you buy buy at Ikea or whichever hardware store you find it is likely much more reliable and economically made than most made a thousand years ago.

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There are widespread archaeological finds going back at least to 1200 BCE. Is that hard enough?

And iron did largely replace bronze, but mostly for economical reasons. It's only with steel you get a clear superiority over bronze.

I am waiting for the day when I read an article in a popsci publication about a new Egyptian discovery and I don't see Zahi Hawass taking credit for the tireless work of other excellent Archaeologists/Egyptologists.

thanks for this legwork, really interesting that the Archaeologist is using the same.

The language is not similar, it's just in the same tree. There is a common linguistic ancestor that they all share but that goes back THOUSANDS of years. Imagine a Spaniard claiming to be pure Roman because of the Latin influence on Spanish and just ignoring the rest of their history? Same thing except add a few thousand years! Additionally most archeologist in the field think that the Aztecs were a group of mercenaries that probably took their language from the tribe they married into or were hired into, took their religion and culture from and after 100 years or so left or were kicked out and then went on to form their own city-state and the rest is history. Point being, the language of the Aztecs is not necessarily the language of their own ancestors and even if it were, it's an ancestor that was not Aztec! It's like saying I am from Africa because all humans are from Africa. Or that all Americans are obviously from England because they speak English. It's silly. The Aztecs emerged from a dominant culture that they borrowed their language and religion from.

Edit: To sum it up: There is ZERO evidence of an Aztec 'homeland' in Arizona. Period. It takes blind faith to believe a story like this and it's insulting to the indigenous peoples whom we do have thousands and thousands of years of archeological evidence for having inhabited these areas in Northern Mexico and Arizona. They share common linguistic ancestors that spread throughout an incredible large geographic area but these people are not and never were Aztec. Stop the madness.

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The Aztec homeland may have been in Arizona. Although current consensus it was still northern Mexico, but they did come from the north near the border.

That is why the Hopi of Arizona speak a language similar to the Nahuatl of the Aztec empire. link

“Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago.”

A lot of that is modern politics in the USA. The Aztecs are used as a totem by political orgs or groups with an agenda to try and unify a diverse group of Spanish speaking immigrants under a common fake ancestry to unify them and use them as a power base. I literally took public school classes where 'Mexican American Studies' teachers were using books that claimed Arizona was the ancestral home of the Aztecs, and if you are Mexican or Chicano the Aztecs are your ancestors, so you didn't really cross the border the border crossed you.

The Aztecs have been fetishized and turned into a totem that is used to organize people who immigrated from south of the border in the USA.

There is no parallel (obviously, I sure you're aware) because the rise of the US was so dependant on the wars in Europe and massive wealth transfers from nations involved in mutual destruction.

Certainly the early 20th Century was when the US went from being mainly resource-based, to seeing a real explosion of manufacturing. This was accelerated by its self sufficiency, indigenous focus on industrial methods, markets, and ability to borrow ideas from Europe and people from everywhere.

China has industrialised so much more quickly but factories and manufactured goods are no longer the valuable and exclusive items they were: high tech manufacture has appeared and surpassed making consumer goods. Capital is now global so the conflicts of 100 years ago are, to an extent, obsolete.

Keeping the wealth from all this production within a country was not much of a concern 100 years ago: today, all the profit can flow out of a nation very easily.

So, if "China" makes an iPhone but the end user and profit takers are in the US, and the manufacture is done as cheaply as possible with equipment that can be removed, how "Chinese" is it?

An impressive overview.

If OP wants a manageable summary I recommend the relevant chapters in Adam Tooze's "Deluge".

Hmm, I thought west Africa had iron smelting further back than that but there’s still some debate about it. Link to Wikipedia and their articles

u/19seventyfour Discussed it more with the guy. General opinion is semi-iron-smelting was in place since the early bronze age. Not hot enough to properly melt off all the oxides and contaminants from the iron, and not in a properly oxygen-free environment to prevent more scale building up, and not with a reliably good system for carbonizing the iron. Also note that it generally wasn't hot enough to alloy the carbon to the iron to create steel (need like 1,700C for that), so the carbon would mostly serve as just another contaminant making it brittle.

Still, they apparently did extract iron from sands and ores this way since early in the bronze age, creating blooms of random quality. They could pound most of the scale out of, and could make the iron thicker to make up for issues of brittleness. This was hard work with no promise of quality, but eventually these factors improved until a proper iron age industry started.

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This is actually related to meteorites, in that partial smelting is necessary to get rid of some of the contaminants, but it is a lot easier than working with terrestrial ores that are less rich in iron.

Honestly, it does sound close to a monopoly, at that rate.

AFAIK, the Mexica peoples had the same issue, only making a limited number of axes a bit before European contact, never working out a good bronze industry. Presumably because their fires weren't hot enough to reliably cast high quality bronze. Probably similar to the iron industry during the bronze age, where they were more like rare, magical weapons. Developing a proper bronze industry would likely make a big difference, being a huge economical advantage.

With the Mississippi, current estimate is they collapsed before Columbus even set foot on Cuba, so European diseases don't seem to be the cause. A bronze industry at some point in their history could probably turn that around. It could even be an inciting incident, causing them to resort to war with a material advantage, creating a riverine empire.

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It may not change things much in the grand scheme of things, but they may also put up a much tougher fight against European incursion and lead to an interesting story. Especially since I'm thinking of incorporating other alternate history elements.

Wondered if you'd be interested in discussing it further.

They chemically castrated him,then he killed himself. You defend that?

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they were the lynch pins because they made literal lynch pins and other very vital but common place things. now obvious they are 1/1000 of the quality of they used to be but hinges for example while stamped on machines havent really changed much in a thousand years.

nails. for example were so crucial they used to burn down buildings just to recover the nails. once these nails were at their final end of life they were used to make doors and nailed over and into themselves through the door. Hence the term - dead as a doornail.

IFL is known for clickbait titles so I looked up the archaeologist’s Insta and he seems to be using the same verbiage! https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn5ADD9ttgE/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

He means “complete” as in the tomb has been untouched since it was first closed (which is a rarity). It does seem to be well preserved and at 4,300 years old it would make it one of the oldest tomb discoveries in Egypt, although not the oldest — the pyramid of Djozer is 4,700 years old.

>Their weapons were largely made of wood and sharpened stone

And the Assyrians largely used metal weapons.

>They had no practical applications for the wheel.

[The Assyrians did](https://arkeonews.net/chariots-in-neo-assyrian-army/#:~:text=Chariots%20were%20the%20most%20significant,(888%2D884%20BC).

>but only the Maya and Olmec had a Bronze Age

The Stone Age/Bronze Age/Iron Age paradigm is based on a specific European historical process that is very different from what happened in many other parts of the world. Pretty much none of the Americas fits this model. Many societies - the Muisca, Aztec, Mixtec, and others - had complex and advanced metallurgical traditions even as they generally didn't use those technologies for utilitarian purposes. Others, like the Purepecha and Inka, made use of metal weapons and tools in certain contexts while still using stone and wood in others, often again while dedicating the most complex metallurgical processes to religious and ostentatious creations.

The three-age system often breaks down in many parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, too. If you're interested in reading more about contemporary archaeologists' critiques of this system, I'm happy to share some articles.

There's no denying that Indigenous American societies such as those of the Maya, Zapotec, Chimor, and others were highly complex. So were those of the ancient Middle East. But they weren't as generally similar as I think is being argued on the basis of them both not fitting the Iron Age or characteristics of 16th century Western Europe.

I went to Egypt in 2021 and it was very nerdishly cool to be in an area so rich in history that they are still making discoveries to this day.

It just seems highly unlikely to me that the oldest mummy found in egypt would also be the "most complete".

Like, I imagine we've found thousands of mummies in egypt, none of them were "more complete" than this?

Are they comparing "completeness" to a select few of other mummies that fit certain categories?

Also, what does "complete" mean in this instance? The article is not at all clear.

Seems kinda ridiculous that the journalist who wrote this couldn't have figured that out.

No, for thousands of years, blacksmiths were critical lynch pins for every settlement in the world.

This is literally the opposite of their position in our society post the industrial revolution.