THE STUDY OF HUMAN PREHISTORY 
where they prove more suitable or economical. We use 
copper in many more ways than were ever dreamed of 
in the Copper Age itself, as we also use stone and wood. 
But steel is the material most characteristic of our times. 
Man has known and employed steel, mainly for making 
weapons and edged tools, for over 2,000 years; but the 
true Age of Steel only began something like half a century 
ago, with its general application to structural uses. Be- 
fore that, civilized man had long been living in the Iron 
Age, which began in the real sense about 3,000 years ago, 
almost certainly in western Asia. Man had known iron 
earlier still, but only so slightly as to consider it a precious 
metal. He forged rings and other ornaments from it, 
and, with the intense superstition which enveloped him, 
he regarded it as something mysterious and uncanny. 
We must not think that the general use of iron sprang 
up in every part of the globe anything like 3,000 years 
ago. The entire Western Hemisphere, which long re- 
mained to all intents and purposes in the late Stone Age, 
learned of it only four centuries ago, as did also portions 
of Asia and Africa and the whole of Australia and the 
great Pacific area. Even yet remote and isolated tribes, 
like the New Guinea Papuans, who use stone, bone, horn, 
or shell for their tools and weapons, are actually living 
in the Stone Age today. This helps us realize as nothing 
else can that widely different culture stages may exist at 
one and the same time in various parts of the world. 
As we delve still deeper into the past, we find that be- 
fore the Iron Age there was a time when, in certain regions 
of the Old World, people depended on bronze (an alloy of 
copper mixed, generally, with about ten per cent of tin) 
as their chief metal. We know this period, therefore, 
as the Bronze Age, and its earliest traces are to be sought 
somewhere around 4000 B. Cc. 
But people did not find out all at once how to combine 
copper and tin to make bronze. Before that they em- 
ployed copper alone, perhaps as far back as 5000 or 
[41] 
