Introduction How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? Charles Lindberg (1902-74) The history of human civilization can be told in different ways. So far in this series, it has been told with plants ( Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History ) and animals ( Fifty Animals that Changed the Course of History ), and in this third volume, we focus on minerals. Minerals, in the broadest sense of the term, encompass a huge variety of natural and manmade materials, including metals and alloys, rocks, crystals, gemstones, organic minerals, salts, and ores. The Rise of Man The history of how and when our hominid ancestors became human is still a matter of debate among anthropologists and archaeologists. The capacities that were once thought to differentiate humans from the "lower" animals--language, social organization, emotions, tool use and manufacture, symbolic reasoning, and self-consciousness--have been shown to be present in other species such as birds, cetaceans, and apes. However, no other species has developed these capacities to the same extent as humans to transform the natural environment and effectively removed itself from the processes of evolution. Humanity's transformation of the environment began with the domestication of plants and animals, but as civilization moved from subsistence farming to urban living, the manufacture of goods, and trade, the emphasis shifted to minerals: stone for building; metals for tools and weapons, and later machinery; hydrocarbons for energy; earths, ores, and salts for industry; and precious and semi-precious stones and metals for currency and adornment. Anthropologists believe that morphological and behavioral changes triggered the process that turned our ape-like ancestors into modern humans. While it is impossible to reconstruct how our pre-human ancestors thought, felt, or related to one another, we have practical evidence of their level of development from their tools--at least those made from durable materials such as stone--the earliest of which are estimated to be around 2.6 millions years old. It is possible that humanity's relationship with tools goes even further back but it may be that these earlier "tools" were found rather than fashioned objects, like those used by chimpanzees today. But once our ancestors started fashioning tools, they radically transformed their relationship with the natural world. The Age of Metals For most of the past 2.6 million years, the human toolset consisted of ever more sophisticated tools made of principally of wood, bone, flint, and obsidian. In around 10,000 years BC, during what is called the "Neolithic Revolution," humans all over the globe established permanent settlements, and agriculture and animal husbandry replaced hunter-gathering as the main human lifestyle. Central to these developments was the technological revolution that affected every area of daily life. The Stone Age made way for the Age of Metals: copper, bronze, and iron. The precious metals gold and silver have modern industrial applications, but their main historical uses have been as currency and jewelry and lay and religious ornamentation, when they were combined with gems such as diamonds, amber, coral, jade, and pearls. For all their technological sophistication, humans still depend for their energy needs on the mineral fuel that powered the First Industrial Revolution, coal, and also petroleum, the power source of the Second Industrial Revolution, now supplemented by the nuclear fuels, uranium and plutonium. Industrial processes from antiquity to the present day have made use of a wide range of metals, ores, alloys, and salts, including alum, aluminium, asphalt, arsenic, sodium, mercury, and steel. Excerpted from Fifty Minerals That Changed the Course of History by Eric Chaline All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
