Posted on 03/21/2021 8:16:36 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
About 8500 years ago, hunter-gatherers living beside Eagle Lake in Wisconsin hammered out a conical, 10-centimeter-long projectile point made of pure copper. The finely crafted point, used to hunt big game, highlights a New World technological triumph—and a puzzle. A new study of that artifact and other traces of prehistoric mining concludes that what is known as the Old Copper Culture emerged, then mysteriously faded, far earlier than once thought.
The dates show that early Native Americans were among the first people in the world to mine metal and fashion it into tools. They also suggest a regional climate shift might help explain why, after thousands of years, the pioneering metallurgists abruptly stopped making most copper tools and largely returned to stone and bone implements.
Earth’s largest and purest copper deposits are found around North America’s Great Lakes. At some point, Native Americans learned to harvest the ore and heat, hammer, and grind it into tools. They left behind thousands of mines and countless copper artifacts, including lethal projectile points, hefty knives and axes, and petite fish hooks and awls. Today, it’s not uncommon to meet residents of the region “who have buckets of copper artifacts [that they’ve found] tucked away in their basements,” says David Pompeani, a geologist at Kansas State University, Manhattan, who studies ancient mining.
When researchers began to date the artifacts and mines, they saw a perplexing pattern: The dates suggested the people of the Old Copper Culture began to produce metal tools about 6000 years ago and then, for reasons that weren’t clear, mostly abandoned copper implements about 3000 years ago. After that, early Native Americans used copper mostly for smaller, less utilitarian items associated with adornment, such as beads and bracelets. “The history is just so peculiar,” in part because many other ancient cultures didn’t abandon metal tools once they learned how to make them, Pompeani says.
About 10 years ago, Pompeani began doctoral research that cast doubt on the Old Copper timeline. He extracted sediment cores from lakes adjacent to prehistoric mines on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale and measured trace metals in the cores, including lead and titanium, that had been released by processing the ore. The analyses showed copper mining began about 9500 years ago in some areas—some 3500 years earlier than once thought. It also ended earlier, about 5400 years ago, Pompeani reported in The Holocene in 2015.
In laboratory tests, replicas of Old Copper Culture arrowheads performed about the same as stone arrowheads. That might be why Old Copper Culture people ultimately abandoned copper points after using them for thousands of years. Michelle Bebber/Kent State University Experimental Archaeology Lab
Now, a team led by Pompeani presents new evidence for the revised timeline. The researchers used modern methods to reanalyze 53 radiocarbon dates—including eight newly collected dates—associated with the Old Copper Culture. Some came from wood or cordage still attached to spearpoints; others came from charcoal, wood, or bone found at mines and human burials. The oldest reliably dated artifact turned out to be the 8500-year-old projectile point found in Wisconsin.
This month in Radiocarbon, the team reports that the most reliable dates, combined with the sediment data, indicate the Old Copper Culture emerged at least 9500 years ago and peaked between 7000 and 5000 years ago. That makes it at least as old, and perhaps older, than copper-working cultures documented in the Middle East, where archaeologists have documented a copper pendant believed to be 8700 years old.
The older window for Old Copper’s peak doesn’t surprise archaeologist Michelle Bebber of Kent State University, Kent, who has studied the culture. The dates confirm “that hunter-gatherers [were] highly innovative,” she says, and willing to “regularly experiment with novel materials.”
But why did the ancient copper experiment abruptly end? Bebber’s work replicating Old Copper–style arrowheads, knives, and awls suggests they weren’t necessarily superior to the alternatives, especially after factoring in the time and effort required to produce metal implements. In controlled laboratory tests, such as shooting arrows into clay blocks that simulate meat, she found that stone and bone implements were mostly just as effective as copper. That might be because Great Lakes copper is unusually pure, which makes it soft, unlike harder natural copper alloys found elsewhere in the world, she says. Only copper awls proved superior to bone hole punchers.
Pompeani has identified another potential contributor to Old Copper’s fade about 5000 years ago. Sediment cores, tree ring data, and other evidence suggest a sustained dry period struck the region around that time, he says. That could have fueled social and ecological disruptions that made it hard to devote time and resources to making copper tools. Over time, copper may have become something of a luxury item, used to signal social status.
Copper awls, however, bucked this trend: They required relatively little ore to make, Bebber notes, and the people of the Great Lakes continued to use them for thousands of years.
In laboratory tests, replicas of Old Copper Culture arrowheads performed about the same as stone arrowheads. That might be why Old Copper Culture people ultimately abandoned copper points after using them for thousands of years. Michelle Bebber/Kent State University Experimental Archaeology Lab
*Of Interest PING*
Obsidian was the wonder material of the ancient world when it came to small cutting tools. Arguably it still should be considered such.
Soft copper comes into its own when combined with flowing water and fine grit sand as the Egyptians used it.
Racist question: would these be the ancestors of today’s Native Americans, or previous groups (e.g. Clovis Man) who predated the present tribes?
Too bad they had no tin. No tin, no Bronze Age.
Smelting tin and copper into bronze led to accidental smelting of iron. This led to the Iron Age in the old world.
Then the good lord left and said... ‘Don’t do a thing until I get back’... When Europeans arrived, they were still a stone age hunter gather society.
Things Europeans didn’t have until they came to North America... Corn, Potatoes, Tabaco and Syphilis.
Things North Americans didn’t have until Europeans came to North America... Horses, gunpowder, iron, colorful beads and Smallpox.
copper artifacts and ingots an be traced to their point of extraction from the earth by the particular mix of impurities. Most of the copper in the bronze of the Bronze Age is mysterious of origin because it matches the Great lakes source and that is not acceptable to the Archaeology narrative. Barry Fell and others have shown mountains of evidence that there was considerable trans-Atlantic traffic copper trade back to 3000 BC or so. It seems to have ended at the end of the Bronze Age when most of the then extant civilizations collapsed.
The mystery is where did the significant amounts of copper from Michigan go. Far more than theamounts used by the copper culture were mined.
http://www.expandedperspectives.com/copper-mines-in-ancient-north-america/
“ One of the mines discovered was three quarters of a mile long, four hundred feet wide and ten to thirty feet deep with connecting tunnels. Scientist and engineers estimate that it would take ten thousand men one thousand years to develop the extensive operations carried on through the region. It is estimated that a total of 1.5 billion pounds of copper were mined by these unknown people. ”
You just knew without reading all the way to the end, that the editors insisted the authors find someway to placate the current political gods of “climate change” to explain some prime findings.
Why? To promote the current alarmism about “climate change”,
What is clear from how “climate change” is referenced in this story and how such references are used by the alarmists?
What is clear is that even if you accepted “climate change” as a prime factor in the “abrupt” end (probably took place over the course of a thousand years) of native North American copper mining, it has very little alarm to it for humans today, because what the natives of 9,000 to 5,000 years ago lacked was the advanced state of human knowledge and technology today, that makes possible human adaptation to, and mitigation of, whatever “climate change” throws at us.
Syphilis originally from new world, old world, or female sheep reproductive systems.?
Thanks Diana in Wisconsin, this is also this week's GGG Digest ping, may be a first for a "New World" news story, btw. Great find!
The glaring hole in this theory (which seems jammed into the prevailing consensus thinking) is the shear volume of copper mined. Where did it go?
I forget the actual number, but it was in the millions of tons of ore; the amount found to date and attributed to Indians, you could pick up in one hand.
Meanwhile, there was a flourishing Copper Age in Europe at the time. If there was an export trade and there is no reason to think otherwise, the locals mined the ore and exported it via the long established trade routes to the East Coast and then elsewhere.
Modern metallurgy can trace the origins of various metals, but so far there is no indication of this test having been done; maybe it went to Europe, or it could just as well have been to the North Africa and the ME, or elsewhere. Supposedly there are ruins off the coast of Cuba down several thousand feet which have copper roofs - but that is unproven in all aspects.
Saying that the Tribes were among the world’s first copper smiths is just pandering to the Tribes inflated egos because there is no evidence that the present day tribes even existed then.
And they also invented microwave oven and the MRI. /s
Right, a culture who had yet to invent alcohol ran the mother of all mining operations. Where are the great cities and copper artifacts? Besides, isn’t mining the equivalent of raping the earth by those who are one with nature?
I remember when I first read about Otzi, the article, at the time, stated that the discovery of the copper axe with him moved the 'copper age' 1,000 years further back in time. I've not read anything like that since that one, early article.
(I know this is bad English but I'm not changing it, to lazy)
Offering a correction - it was not millions of tons mined, but 223,215 tons of 99% pure copper. Today’s copper is 3-4% pure. Scherz, “The Sone facet Mummy Mountain”, 4.
I've always thought something like that myself. I'm beginning to think that if the 'American copper' had gone foreign that we'd have detected it by now though.
Even ancient ship wrecks with copper cargoes are void of 'American copper'.
Are you suggesting you'd have to be plastered to do that much mining? ;-)
I know the Incas and Aztecs drank alcohol, but i don't know the dates and if ever extended to North America.
“ I know the Incas and Aztecs drank alcohol, but i don’t know the dates and if ever extended to North America.”
Yeah, and they had huge cities like Tikal, and tenochtitlan, and extensive canals still buried in the jungle in the yucatan that hint at populations in the millions. Even the egyptians paid their workers with beer
There are NO “native” Americans. Some immigrants just got here before others.
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