What if we called it the Flax Age instead of the Iron Age?

But that's not correct, though, and is exactly the kinds of misunderstandings you might expect people to have if they interpret the ages in simplistic, metallurgic = weapons way.

Bronze age cultures did not "wipe out" stone age cultures with their new, fancy bronze weapons. First of all, bronze weapons weren't even a defining feature of the early bronze age, swords not appearing for a good 1500 years, and spear tips being a fairly minor part of what was being developed in bronze. Second, the description seems to imply a period of stone-age cultures sitting around with bad weapons, getting attacked by other cultures who had invented bronze. Rather, those same "stone age" cultures were gradually incorporating bronze-making into their culture.

The bronze age ended with more of a "collapse," but that was due to a huge number of factors, not simply some new culture having invented iron and jumping out from behind some unexplored region of the map, Age of Empires-style.

I'm interested in reading this. I think I disagree with the main thesis though.

The most important forces in history are geography, demographics, and information flow, probably in that order.

I would propose that the history of the west largely hinges on the printing press. Gutenberg doesn't invent the press, Luther never gets the word out about Reformation, Enlightenment never occurs, John Smith never writes Wealth of Nations, America never splits from Britain, etc.

See Figure 5 on page 10 of "Prices and the Growth of the European Knowledge Economy, 1200-2007" https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:384596/FULLTEXT0...

Note that after the continuous decline in price from 1350 to 1650, the price of paper stabilized due to the demand from printers. The availability of linen rags was another limiting factor until the development of wood pulp paper.

On page 9 -"Vellum and parchment were not viable for mass production. A well-known example is the Gutenberg Bible, of which 30 copies were printed on parchment. Each parchment copy required the skins of more than 300 sheep."

So if you're saying hand-carved woodblock printing should be considered a "press", sure the Chinese had a "press." If you're going to tell me that the printing press could not have been the important factor because a hand-carved woodblock typeset is just as economical as an actual press with metal movable type, I'm willing to debate you on that.

China had moveable type but not a mechanical press.

>Most of the tin used by the Mediterraneans was imported from Britain.

This is an interesting one because it touches on the evolution of bronze. Early bronze was made from nearby co-occurring deposits, including arsenic bronze which was made from the arsenic that is often found along with copper. However because tin was much rarer than copper, and because there was a lot of it in Britain, the long-term evolved solution was to transport the tin across great distances. I'm not completely sure but I believe that the tin trade route post-dates the invention of bronze.

>Extracting metal from an ore (smelting) does not in general involve melting temperatures, and neither does working the metal into tools.

That's a good catch, but it's also worth pointing out that campfires still can't smelt copper, and also that early iron furnaces, incapable of melting iron as they were, still had to be enclosed and fed with forced air.

I was about to say this. Iron smelting was a later invention, but once it was discovered, it's actually significantly easier to smelt iron than bronze, even if you start from zero (i.e. knowledge only, no tools), due to the geographical scarcity of tin. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGLE0usN_I

So you can easily say bronze requires a more advanced civilization than does iron, given the more complicated trade routes required. In that sense, developing Bronze before smelted iron is partially a historical/geological artifact (although one replicated in the Americas). the southern half of Africa was cut off from European and Asian sources of tin but geographical barriers (and there are no tin sources in Africa itself), so they skipped Bronze and went straight to Iron smelting.

>wrought iron is highly inferior to bronze.

What?

Wrought iron is immensely more useful than bronze in many applications demanding strength (per weight or per volume, take your pick) and/or toughness.

There's a reason things like metal bridges, railways, etc. all became common only after wrought iron became readily available.

Likewise for cast iron, other than malleability it is mechanically superior to bronze.

There's a reason the only time you see bronze these days is bushing material and applications demanding corrosion resistance for which aluminum/zinc alloys would be unsuitable.

The earliest refining of iron also produced a little steel as a byproduct. There is reason to believe that iron refining is as old as, or even older than bronze, and steel would have been made with that iron. However bronze was easier to work with (I think this refers to readily available ore though I haven't looked into this and could be wrong as to reasons). In general a craftsman would use bronze where possible, iron where bronze didn't work (which wasn't often, bronze is better than most people think), and steel only where required. For files and other metal working tools not much steel is required and the advantages would be worth it (though these might be case hardened iron - we suspect they knew how to do this long ago but there is no historic record to be sure)

The are plenty of stories passed down about magic swords that could cut others in half. If someone collected enough steel from the little that would made it would be magic compared to other swords, but the effort to collect that much steel would be enough that few such swords would be made.

Dwarf Fortress taught me to always import bismuthinite and cassiterite stones on embark, along with willow logs.

Real history shows that tin mines were a major strategic asset for pre-steel civilization, and Devon and Cornwall on Britain had the oldest and deepest mines in the world, and continued working after other European sources were exhausted.

Even if you know how to make steel, making types suitable for non-specialty work in significant quantities was difficult until smelting technology upgraded to the Bessemer process, and the types of available steels meant that a lot of cannons were still cast bronze. On a historical scale, it is only very recently that newer steel alloys and mass-produced aluminum has obsoleted bronze for just about everything but cymbals, certain corrosion-resistant fittings, and yellowish coinage cladding.

But then do you consider mathematics a science?

That's not what they said, they were showing that the article was claiming biases without a sound argument.

They use hard science tools, but archaeology is still trying to determine facts about culture and ancient societies, which are distinctly not hard.