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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

> Never cold, plenty of wood everywhere.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_Technology

> Primitive Technology is a YouTube channel run by John Plant. Based in [Far North Queensland] in the Australian state of Queensland,

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_North_Queensland

> Far North Queensland has a tropical climate and as such, the name Tropical North Queensland is sometimes used to refer to the region, mostly due to the tourism industry.

> Making clay seems to be easy.

I agree. [At least the rivers I know have plenty of clay.]

> Large quantities of metals in the ground.

I guess this is the most difficult part. It depends a lot on the exact place you are. It would be nice to know how much sand did he process and how much iron he got.

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Trace amounts of iron are present almost every where on the planet, most of it is bound to other elements though. You can easily find small "lines" of it in streams and river beds

Yep, and this was the initial benefit of iron despite bronze generally being better - you can find it anywhere, vs needing to source both copper and tin which tended to come from different, far flung places.

But the Bronze Age preceded the Iron Age...

But iron won out in the end. It's harder to process, but the result is better.

Bronze has a lower melting point compared to Iron making it much easier to work with. I think you also have to invent charcoal first to reach the temperatures necessary to melt iron ore.

Iron was originally produced without melting it at all. Instead, iron ore was reacted with reduced gases, and a flux (limestone) causes the silicate contaminants to melt instead. The solid iron that's obtained (sponge iron) is then forged into shape (and also beaten to remove residual silicates.)

I googled it, and apparently we still do that, at least for some of the production.

Yes, direct reduced iron (DRI). We may be moving back to it, too, when we move to green hydrogen as the reducing agent.

Seems like if there were enough metal in the soil to be this easy to retrieve, a larger mining interest would already be there. Then again, I know nothing of Queensland to know if it is protected against that kind of thing or not.

"It's there" != "it's economical to extract commercially". And that != "it's more economical to extract than other places".

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