Is there a history of metal somewhere? Bronze, copper, tin, steal, gold, harvesting, forging, etc. It would be an interesting read of history, science, and discovery.
Wikipedia tells me that the earliest artifacts of metal comes from 7000 years ago.
Edit: Downvotes? I'm expressing my own naivety. Not everyone has intuition of the heights of empires and what that means for metal usage.
And that they basically copied large chunks of their own culture from Greece which invented democracy a few centuries earlier.
I mean, even Christian fundamentals have that context based on their lecture of the Christ saga.
It's all fundamentally what our own culture is based on in the West, just look at Washington DC and the buildings. Or Wall St. The Greco-Roman influence is permeating the West.
If you took a random sampling of American's and asked them "when did people start using metal," what do you think the average response would be? I'd expect the answers to range from one hundred years ago to a million years ago.
It's nearly impossible to grow up in Western culture and not have some extremely basic asterix-level understanding of geography, yet we have people who literally cannot name a single country on a map of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umpalMtQE50
But if you made them pause and consider the map, and you highlighted the US and asked pointedly, "This is the US, right?" Probably most of them would correctly say yes.
This is the difference between highlighting and consideration vs. not. Many people (most?) aren't going to have the thought of "when did humans start using metal?" It's a very specific question. Until they really consider it, for many it will be assumed to be within some ridiculous range.
Have you pointedly considered every historical question in the universe? If not, what wildly incorrect assumptions might you be making about history? If there are any (there are), then you shouldn't be so judgmental of others' assumptions about some things.
To me, when I think of metal I think of computers, cars, train rail, braces, buildings. When I think old, I think stone. When I think Roman, I think old, therefore stone. "Height of the roman empire" doesn't even work in changing this perception. How long did the roman empire exist? (The assumption for falls into the same wild range predicament.) I guess they had metal coins, but did they have them the whole time if it was an empire that existed for a long time? Metal I guess was used in the middle ages right? So like, maybe towards the far-late stage of the Roman empire, like 500 AD?
It's just an unhelpful comment and criticism that comes from the perspective of believing everyone's brain should act like the commenter's.
I guess you must mean swords, but I feel that the subtext of your comments is humble-bragging how obvious these things are to you.
See my comment to your sibling comment by neuronic.