The Bronze Age was the first truly transformative moment in history. It marked the first time humans started to work with metal. Bronze tools and weapons soon replaced earlier stone versions, reducing their reliance on less effectual materials.

The dates for the start of the Bronze Age vary from place to place because copper and tin – the two metals needed to make bronze – are not available everywhere and because the necessary technology was invented or acquired at different times. Civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean region (Crete, Greece, Turkey Cypress in particular), began working with bronze earlier  (before 3000 B.C.), while the British Isles and China entered the Bronze Age much later—at around 1900 B.C. and 1600 B.C., respectively.

Bronze is made mostly of copper, alloyed with a small percentage of tin. Most of the copper for the Mediterranean Near Eastern Bronze Age came from the island of Cyprus. Why that is so has largely to do with climate and geology.

To extract copper from ore, you need to heat it, which was done with charcoal fires that burned better than wood fires because charcoal is burnt wood with most of the water in the wood drained out. Since charcoal is burnt wood, there has to be forests with plenty of trees that can be cut down and burnt. Moreover, the forests themselves must be able to grow back to supply more trees. Cyprus fulfills both conditions. Whereas elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, the climate was drier. Cyprus had more rainfall, enabling its forests to grow back after cutting.

What about tin? Ancient Cypriot artisans got most of their tin from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Archaeological explorations carried out in the 198-s revealed ancient sites in Anatolia that were once Bronze Age tin mines. As it turns out, Cyprus is quite close to those tin mines. In fact, Anatolian areas that were rich in tin were separated from Cyprus by just 50 miles of sea. This proximity was in turn shaped by the geology of the region. Tectonic plate motions that occurred over hundreds of millions of years brought Anatolia and Cyprus into close proximity, facilitating the procurement of tin and copper to make bronze around 5,000 years ago, and ushering inthe Bronze Age.

We often take sole credit for the rise of the world’s greatest civilizations. As this brief history of the Bronze Age shows, we couldn’t have got this far without the help of nature – the vast tracks of forests in Cyprus that provided a a renewable source of charcoal, and the abundance of tin in nearby Anatolia. And it was also very fortuitous that these two places were brought in close proximity by way of the movements of plate tectonics beneath the earth’s surface. With these pieces in place, the world was transformed, first in the Near East, and later to many other civilizations thousands of kilometers apart, reducing mankind’s dependence on ineffectual and less malleable materials. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Further study

Walter Alvarez, A Most Improbable Journey: A Big History of Our Planet and Ourselves, W.W. Norton, New York, 2017