Without our precious metals we would still be living in tribes, wandering in search for food.

The Neolithic ended when people stopped using stone tools and started to use tools made out of metal.

Mankind has searched for and fought over these metals since the end of the Neolithic (Stone Age).

Metal has lifted mankind’s technology from simple stone tools and weapons to computers and space travel.

Inscriptions, distinctive markings, and historical documents can all offer clues to an artifact’s age.

This method works effectively up to about 58,000 to 62,000 years.This paper summarizes radiocarbon measurements of mainly botanical samples from the Iceman ("Otzi") and from his discovery site, an Alpine glacier at the Austrian-Italian border.The results were obtained by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) at 3 different laboratories (Vienna, Austria; Uppsala, Sweden; Gif-sur-Yvette, France) between 19.All the dates, except 2, are consistent with the time period 3360-3100 BC, as previously determined from bone and tissue samples from the Iceman himself.The 2 exceptional dates from wooden artifacts suggest that the site of the Iceman was used as a mountain pass for millennia prior to and after the lifetime of "Otzi".The reason scientists think jewelry came first is because they have found human skeletons surrounded by metal jewelry and stone tools . (Necropolis is a fancy scientist word for graveyard.) The gold and copper artifacts found in Varna Necropolis are mostly beads and other forms of jewelry.The tools found in the graves are mostly made from stone. It didn’t take long for people to start making tools out of copper.Later called Ötzi the Iceman, small samples from his body were carbon dated by scientists.The results showed that Ötzi died over 5000 years ago, sometime between 33 BC. It is found in the air in carbon dioxide molecules.Materials that originally came from living things, such as wood and natural fibres, can be dated by measuring the amount of carbon-14 they contain.For example, in 1991, two hikers discovered a mummified man, preserved for centuries in the ice on an alpine mountain.In fact, Otzi, the Iceman, was found high in the Alps with several artifacts including a flint knife, flint-tipped arrows, and a copper-bladed ax. Native metal means you can pick up a nugget of copper or gold and pound on it with a hammer and make stuff out of it.Archaeologists use the exponential, radioactive decay of carbon 14 to estimate the death dates of organic material.He demonstrated the accuracy of radiocarbon dating by accurately estimating the age of wood from a series of samples for which the age was known, including an ancient Egyptian royal barge of 1850 BCE.The dating method is based on the fact that carbon is found in various forms, including the main stable isotope (carbon 12) and an unstable isotope (carbon 14).