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*
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.
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.
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
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)
There are NO “native” Americans. Some immigrants just got here before others.
Hunter-gatherers were also part-time farmers much earlier than archeologists used to beleive. They also traded more widely than archeologists used to beleive.
The best known agricultural tribe in what is now North Dakota is the Mandan, a Siouxian cousin tribe, that begin to arrive and grow corn, beans and squash around 1350 a.d. in the Knife River Valley.
But they weren't the first, just the largest and the most famous. Copper culture artifacts once thought unique to the Great Lakes Region and related to corn growing have been found elsewhere in North Dakota at least two centuries before the Mandan begin to arrive from the Ohio Valley.
p
Pounding a metal is no more metallurgy than carving a stick is carpentry. It’s about melting and mixing elements and reshaping them into a new form and kind.
There are a couple of interesting Great Lakes copper culture videos that have recently been uploaded to youtube. One focuses on the thousand+ prehistoric copper mines on Isle Royale and the other on carbon dating that takes the culture back 9,000+ years.
The Lake Superior Copper Mystery | Isle Royale |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWWqQ6eSvfo&t=2s&ab_channel=cf-apps7865
New Study ~ 9,500 Years Ago Great Lakes Copper Culture Started (Discussion of the Science Mag article linked in the thread headline)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iChHiLwqzU&ab_channel=cf-apps7865