Materials · c. 8,500 BCE

Native copper working

Pure copper nuggets hammered into beads and awls.

By the ninth millennium BCE, people at Çayönü Tepesi in Anatolia hammered native copper into beads and small tools. Some pieces were annealed, softening the metal for further working. This used naturally metallic copper, long before smelting extracted it from ore.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia Source

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 1

Ground stone axes 46k BCE

What it led to 1

Copper smelting 5000 BCE

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

World GDP over a million years Latest: 41k billion 1990 international $ (2000) Source: DeLong 1998, Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C. - Present; Wikipedia: Gross world product (DeLong table, cross-check)

World population over a million years Latest: 6.27k million people (2000) Source: DeLong 1998, table 'Total World Population' (Kremer series); Kremer 1993, Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990, QJE 108(3)