Frank Marchunt, age 11, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for his question:
What is meant by the Bronze Age?
The Bronze Age takes us back to an early chapter in the lives of our ancestors. Our family tree sprang from many roots and each cultural group advanced at its own rate. Some reached their Bronze Age earlier in time and some later. But in every case, the Bronze Age chapter put a final end to the ancient Stone Age.
Anthropologists of the last century thought of human progress as ages, or chapters related to the materials our ancestors had learned to master. The early cavemen shaped stone to make their tools, their weapons and their artwork. They lived in the Paleolithic chapter, the Old Stone Age that lasted hundreds of thousands of years. Various Paleolithic peoples wandered through Europe and Asia while the Ice Ages came and went. Using only their primitive good sense and their primitive stone implements they never¬theless coped with unbelievable hardships through unbelievable ages of time.
Most records of Paleolithic life are buried forever in the past. But archeologists have pieced together a more vivid picture of the Neolithic, the New Stone Age, that followed the old. The climate was better and the human communities took advantage of it. Life was easier and they had more time to express themselves. They worked with new materials and added art to their handiwork. They modeled with clay and improved their skills to mural masterpieces of animals. They learned to weave and carve wood. And the greatest changes occurred when the Neolithic peoples of the past settled down to learn agriculture.
In Mesopotamia and by the Nile River, in China and India, various Neolithic cul¬tures progressed at their own rate. But the progressive lessons were similar. One by one, different groups learned to shape soft nuggets of copper into works of art. Copper is too soft for tools and weapons, and it is nice to think that mankind mastered his first metal to create beauty. But metal work did not remain in the field of art. One by one, the Neolithic cultures learned to smelt mixtures of metals to create durable alloys.
The first of these discoveries was bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Bronze is much harder than either copper or tin and Neolithic man shaped it to make sharp edged tools and weapons. So far as we know, the first Bronze Age began in Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago and lasted 2,000 or 3,000 years. Bronze went out of style because our ancestors discovered iron, a better metal, to replace it.
The sturdy Iron Age has continued through many centuries. As different cultures advanced toward civilization, iron became the common metal for tools and weapons. It was improved and refined, used to make steel and smelted with other metals to create superior alloys. Iron is the basic metal of our tools and weapons, our industrial machines. Yes, future generations will classify us as people of the Iron Age.