Stone age – Bronze age: what about the Copper age?

If the Stone Age ended conclusively the moment the first human smelted copper from copper ore, then how do historians classify the thousands of years between that moment and the traditional beginning of the Bronze age?

Stone age: 2.5 million years ago – 9000 BCE

Imaginative depiction of the Stone Age, by Viktor Vasnetsov


Golden age:  Isaac Asimov speculated that gold was the “first metal.”  His reasoning is that gold by its chemistry is found in nature as nuggets of pure gold. In other words, gold, as rare as it is, is always found in nature as the metal that it is. Almost all other metals are found in ores, a mineral bearing rock, that require heat or some other process to liberate the metal. Another feature of gold is that it is workable as it is found, meaning that no technology is required beyond our human eyes to find it. Thus, a gold nugget, a stone hammer, and a stone anvil to work the metal was all that they needed. The earliest Stone age tools were stone, bone, wood, and sinew. These sufficed to work gold.

Soon after the discovery of gold, we can assume while out searching for gold, copper was discovered.

Copper age?

Copper has a history of use that is at least 10,000 years old; estimates of its discovery place it around  9000 BCE in the Middle East. The earliest use of bronze places the start of the Bronze Age around 3600 BCE.

Native copper

Copper occurs naturally as native copper and was known to some of the oldest civilizations on record. It has a history of use that is at least 10,000 years old, and estimates of its discovery place it at 9000 BC in the Middle East. Pure copper is soft and malleable; a freshly exposed surface has a reddish-orange color.


  1. cold working of native copper,
  2. annealing,
  3. smelting,
  4. the lost wax method.

Bronze age: 3600 – 1300 BCE

Bronze age and iron age artifacts

Tin, or the discovery of tin, resulted from an unintentional alloying due to an unknown trace metal content in some copper ore.  The addition of this second metal (tin) to copper increased its hardness, lowered its melting temperature, and improved the casting process by producing a more fluid melt that cooled to a denser, less spongy metal. Cassiterite (SnO2), the tin oxide form of tin, was most likely the original source of tin discovered in ancient times. This was the important innovation that allowed for much more complex shapes cast in closed molds. As a result of this accidental discovery, tin was added into the molten copper and bronze was born. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Bronze was an important advance because it had the edge-durability and stiffness that pure copper lacked and brought about the Bronze Age. Until the advent of iron, bronze was the most advanced metal for tools and weapons in common use.

Iron age: 1300 BCE

Between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE, diffusion in the understanding of iron metallurgy and utilization of iron objects became vast and far-flung.

So why is there a three age system – Stone age, a Bronze age, and an Iron age?



In 1881 John Evans recognizing that the use of copper often preceded the use of bronze distinguished between a transitional Copper Age and the Bronze Age proper. He did not include this transitional period in the tripartite system of Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age but placed it at the beginning outside of it. He did not, however, present it as a fourth age, but chose to retain the traditional three-age system.

In 1884 Gaetano Chierici, perhaps following Evans’ lead, renamed it in Italian as the  “Bronze-stone” transition. This phrase never meant that the period is one in which both bronze and stone were used. The Copper Age features the use of copper, excluding bronze; moreover, stone continued to be used in a minor industry throughout both the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. “Litica” simply names the Stone Age as the point from which the transition began and is not another -lithic age. The Neolithic was never part of the Stone Age, which ended conclusively the moment the first smelter succeeded in obtaining copper from copper ore for the first time.

So as history has it – we learn about the Stone age, the Bronze age and the Iron age and as of yet – no copper age.

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