5,000 year old iron production in India?

[BillyBones]

If initial testing proves positive at a site in India it will predate the earliest evidence of smelting iron by the Hittites by 2,000 years. It is beleived that the Hittites started making iron ~1,500 BC (IIRC) This site in India has the earliest dating at ~3,400 BC and another at ~2,500 BC. 

Again these are initial tests and still must be verified. 

https://thewire.in/history/tamil-nadus-iron-legacy-dates-back-over-5000-years-suggest-archaeological-findings

[Frosty]

Thanks for the link Billy I knew indications were that Iron was being made and used in India earlier than elsewhere.

This will be enjoyable reading and cite checking. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[George N. M.]

Very interesting.  The article is more in depth than a lot of popular archaeology articles.  I would find interesting a discussion of why or why not iron smelting technology spread from this area to replace bronze the way it seems to have in the mid-eat area.

[Nobody Special]

If it's true, it's really cool. But it brings up a lot of the usual questions. Is the source trustworthy? Has it been/will it be peer vetted and reviewed? Is there a chance that it could be later artifacts found in a site with the earlier organic matter? If you had widespread iron production, where are the other artifacts? Why is there such a large gap between this and other iron production in the area? Why didn't it spread to other cultures? What are the artifacts, and could they be from meteoric iron? Did they find slag piles or other things relating to smelting? How did they find smelting iron, which is harder to do accidentally than copper or white metals? Enquiring minds want to know.

I found this article, which has a little more info - seems they found about 85 tools: axes, chisels, spearheads, and maybe a sword or three, and did Carbon-14 dating of charcoal found in burial urns with or near some of the items. Sivagalai rewrites the past: Time travel on an iron spear . Some of it's as recent as 685 B.C, and some of it is about 5300 years old. I dunno, Carbon 14 dating is good when it's good, but it can easily be skewed through human error (or human on purpose).

[Frosty]

While interesting I'd be a lot more interested if they'd included some evidence, test methods, etc. in the article. It was written more like the author was trying to convince the reader they were real scientists, maybe "his" scientists were better than the other scientists. 

It'll give me something neutral to "research" for a while. I'll check out the link Nobody, thanks.

Frosty The Lucky.

[JHCC]

I didn’t find anything in a quick search of Google Scholar, but I’ll try again later. 

[Daswulf]

Something has to explain their ability to carve hard stone to intricate shapes other than copper. Just like other places around the globe. 

[Frosty]

You can carve stone with stone, especially harder stone. Flint carves quartzite nicely. There is spectral and chemical analysis to determine what was used. The site provides no scientific evidence, it's all scholarly opinion. 

I'm not calling bull, I just need more solid evidence before I form an opinion other than interested skepticism.

Frosty The Lucky.

[BillyBones]

I have watched a few videos of people knapping stone. One of the tools they use is a piece of deer antler. Now i am no expert  but i am thinking that antler is softer than the flint they were knapping. Now i know that knapping an arrow head is not carving the Sphinx but it proves that you can manipulate and shape stone with a softer material than the stone. 

[JHCC]

In the stonecarving Frosty mentions, it’s a question of one stone having greater resistance to compression (one stone hitting another) or abrasion (one stone rubbing against another) than the other.

Flintknapping, on the other hand, takes advantage of flint’s low tensile strength. Whether you’re doing percussion flaking (striking with another stone or a mallet) or pressure flaking (pushing with an antler tip or some other pointed tool), the idea is to force flakes outward, away from the desired shape.

Antler resists compression better than than flint resists tension, so it can shape the stone even though it’s nominally “softer”. On the other hand, a sharpened flint blade can cut antler, because the compressive strength of flint is stronger than that of antler. 

[George N. M.]

There are some stones which are very tough and will carve other stones fairly easily. The amphibolite group of minerals, "greenstone", have a fiberous crystal structure and are fairly hard.  The only really effective way to shape them is by grinding.  This is what was commonly used for axes in the Neolithic (late stone age).  You can ruin a steel rock hammer by trying to break off a piece of amphibolite.

I have always thought that a slab of amphibolite would make a fairly decent anvil but probably would have as much rebound as steel.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Frosty]

I was thinking of the jade group of stone would those be amphibolites? 

I have a beautiful largish, eyeball estimate 64 cu.ft. almost polished ultra-mafic dornic almost in our driveway I've always thought would make a fine anvil but it's a little too close to the forest to play with fire. 

I know it's very hard and impact resistant, I discovered it by hitting it with a  D7 dozer while rolling the organic overburden out of the way. Stopped the dozer like hitting a patio wall in your Radio flier. It didn't even scuff the boulder though the dozer blade took some scratching moving it where it is today. I got silly once and tried breaking a chip off with a sledge hammer a couple years later without marring the finish.

I've never taken a hardness test kit to it though.

Frosty The Lucky.

[BillyBones]

Frosty, your Dozer tale reminds me. 

When we were in Iraq one of the tanks in my platoon was fitted with a mine plow. We were advancing on an objective that had a mine field. We had that tank drop the plow and clear a path. About 200 meters from our objective the tank stopped dead in its tracks. The Iraqi's had built a concrete wall underground just deep enough for the plow to hit. The loader was awarded a bronze star because he jumped out of the turret and pulled the release pins from the plow while taking small arms fire.  

[Frosty]

I hope the rest of the guys in his crew bought him a beer at least.

I'm thankful I've never had to exhibit that kind of courage. I was lucky in the lottery or I would've gone to Viet Nam.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Nobody Special]

On 2/8/2025 at 10:30 AM, BillyBones said:

The loader was awarded a bronze star because he jumped out of the turret and pulled the release pins from the plow while taking small arms fire.  

Bronze star? They let an officer drive the tank? That had been me, I'd have got an ACOM or maybe an Article 15 for damaging government property. Rather get mortared than shot at - it's less personal.

There's a lot of amphiboles, some of which are brittle - asbestos for one. When you get to jade, it's complicated. So nephrite is an amphibole, jadeite isn't, although they look and act almost exactly the same. Amphibolites contain amphibole, but have almost no quartz. Think hornblendes and some of the feldspars. Nephrite may have quartz in it, or might not, so I'm not sure whether they qualify, or if they're one of the ones with fuzzy edges.  I'm guessing by your description that the rock in your driveway is green, so if ultramafic, it's probably mostly olivine, which wouldn't be an amphibolite.

Grant you, this is all based on a bunch of YouTube videos and Google searches from when I got obsessed with green beach rocks a couple of years ago. There's a lot of itty bitty semi-precious gems on the beach up here, and we wanted to know what we were tumbling when we weren't doing jaspers and agates. All of the green rocks look like...well, green rocks when they're wet.

[Frosty]

Our dozer stopping driveway boulder is shiny black, not quite glossy if I clean it off. 

IIRC there was a period, especially here, where any green stone was some type of "jade-ite." Real jade can be very difficult to polish because of it's fibrous molecular structure. I don't recall clearly but think it's a non-crystalline stone. Chemically, jade and asbestos are the same except for different molecularly bonded water contents.

We live on a lateral moraine (till) and there is no telling what you'll find in the ground or where it originated. About 250' from the black driveway rock I pulled the same stunt in the doe pasture peeling the organic overburden off but this rock is granite about the size of a pickup truck cab. That's what's visible, it appears to be generally spherical but the exposure is nowhere near the halfway point so it could be much larger than guesstimated.

All I know for sure about it is I'm GLAD I was wearing the seat belt when I hit it. The D7 not only stopped cold a split second after impact the tracks hit the ground again. The belt left a bruise and my legs flew forward and up into the bottom edge of the dash board. I STILL have the dents in my shins! The pain to my shins had me whited out, literally blind with pain, happily I was able to put the drive selector in neutral so the dozer didn't sit there and dig itself into the ground spinning the tracks.

I don't think that rock even quivered and unless I wanted a blaster to shoot it. . . The goats and livestock guardian dogs loved it. The goats ran up and down, played king of the rock and the LGDs thought it was THE place to lay and watch. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[BillyBones]

When i was at Ft. Knox we had a group of West Point cadets come and we had to teach them how to load, drive, and gun the tank. Some were all right but for the most part was like working with a bunch of fresh butter bars. 

My mom has this bowl that is carved out of some kind of quartz i think. A white milky kind of stone. The bowl is at least 12" long and 6" wide carved in a clam shell kind of pattern. Inside the bowl are bunches of grapes made from rose quartz, white quartz, amethyst, and light jade. The leaves are made from a dark jade. 

Her mahjong set is in an alligator skin case the little scoring chips are also made of semi precious stones like jade and amethyst. They are all kept on little brass posts. The tiles themselves are made of ivory. 

My grandfather was a full bird in the US Army Air Force, then the Air Force, when my mom was younger they did a lot of traveling in the orient. She has some of the coolest stuff. Then my dad got stationed in Puerto Rico so she collected a bunch of stuff from the Caribbean as well.  

[Frosty]

Our family is sadly untraveled, my maternal Grandfather served overseas in WWI until he was wounded (by his tent stake) and shipped back to the states, less than 1 month deployed. I guess there wasn't much use for Superior court judges in the trenches.

I had one Uncle who flew DC3s to and from China over the pass pre war, so no fighting. When he was drafted he was assigned as the driver for high end VPs, like the Pres. My paternal Grandfather was killed in 1919 by the flu pandemic. I'm a shirt tail relation to Bill Cody and fairly closely related to William Tecumseh Sherman, my Grandmother's first cousin, whatever that makes us. Both on my paternal Grandmother's side. So no combat vets since the American Civil war.

No souvenirs from around the world though, a couple pocket watches and a mod 94, 3030 Winchester repeating rifle, my Brother left to his boys. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[BillyBones]

I did a bit of study about military history when i was younger. Gen. William T. Sherman was in my opinion one of the best generals we have ever had. Love him or hate him he knew what it meant to fight and win a war. 

My grandfather served in England. My other grandfather was just an average Joe that served under Bradley, and like me, on a tank in Italy and then into Germany. Just about every male in my family has served in the military.  

[Frosty]

He hated war with a passion so when forced to fight he fought with a passion. He was also a student of history so often disregarded "traditional" strategies and tactics. His strategy to win the Civil war was not to beat the confederate army, it was to destroy the Confederacy's ABILITY to resist. He loved the south dearly and argued vehemently against going to war though he was indifferent to slavery. The south was completely unprepared on any point to fight the north.

He's a fascinating character, well worth reading about.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Nobody Special]

Honestly, they completely lacked the infrastructure and the industrial base. That the South got as far as it did was testimony to incompetent leadership, mismanagement, and a serious lack of political will/morale in the Northern armies.

The South was also prone to strategic errors (like dropping trench warfare) and also badly mismanaged what little resources it had, but it had some hellacious fighters, although a lot of those were horrible human beings - take Lt. Gen. "firstest with the mostest", for example. There's a great book about the logistical issues, "Ersatz in the South" that starts with how they got around shortages but then ends up talking about the reasons for them - like crops rotting in the fields and warehouses instead of going to the troops because they'd commandeered all the horses and wagons.

And btw, being that close of kin to General Sherman means you're some kind of cousin to my first ex; I believe she was a direct descendant.

[BillyBones]

For a fun read about some of the officers of the time, including Robert E. Lee read about the "Eggnog Riots" at West Point. Took place somewhere around 1830. A bunch of cadets got drunk and took over West Point. 

[Nobody Special]

And also almost killed an instructor, yup. And the time Jefferson Davis got drunk and fell in a ravine. My favorite though, is the apocryphal story of how Edgar Allen Poe got tossed out. Think "and a light coat of CLP".

[BillyBones]

My favorite thing about it was the staff basically said back off when they sober up it will be over. And that was how it ended. 

I forgot about Jeff falling in the ravine. 

From what i gathered Poe was a pretty well respected military man. Poe is one of my favorite authors and it has been about 25 years since i studied him but wasnt him getting kicked out of West Point about not going to class? 

[Nobody Special]

The true story is probably something close to that, plus drinking a lot with the local villagers. The apocryphal story is something like for drinking with the villagers, he got assigned several days of extra duty marching around in full dress and kit...and then showed up to the first early morning drill sky-clad except for his hat and a pistol belt, and if this were a modern Army story "a light coat of CLP".