Copper, Bronze, Iron and Lithium Age: metals that redefined civilizations

Societal material progress has been based on the ability of humans to improve their productivity and efficiency with the aid of technological innovations. Take for example, the steam engine — the machine that kick-started the first industrial revolution in the 1700s. This invention rapidly diffused into our daily lives, by affecting the transportation, textile, infrastructure and agriculture industries and also gave impetus to improve other societal factors like sanitation, labor laws and housing. In the recent past, we’ve experienced two more such revolutions — the second (energy revolution in the 1800s) and the third (telecommunication and electronics revolution in the 1900s) — and are currently in the midst of the fourth (digital revolution in the 2000s). What all the four technological revolutions have in common are innovations that have helped improve and optimize human performance and efficiency either for conquering time or resources in nature. But behind these shorter timescale revolutions, and potentially leading to greater tectonic shifts in human civilizations, have been the great metal age revolutions, if I may be allowed to say so.

The metal ages in human civilization began around 8000 years ago, during which our ancestors learnt to use and advance the art of metallurgy for materials such as copper, tin, bronze, and iron. Historically, although often chronologically separated, the world has seen three large metal ages — the copper/chalcolithic age, the bronze age, and the iron age. The discovery of the process of smelting and shaping these metals had major consequences on the way civilizations advanced, primarily through the three Cs: culture, commerce, and conquest, respectively. What distinguished the ages from each other? What were some of the pivotal capabilities that they provided? What were some of the darker sides of those ages? What kinds of civilizations thrived in those ages and how did they come to an end? Can the answers shed some light on the future? And how might those lessons be interpreted in the context of our new concepts of nation states? Reflecting on some of these becomes particularly important given that we have entered a new metal age — the Lithium age. And what ‘C’ might this contribute to, you may ask. I’d say, control. In this interconnected yet interdependent world, with highly strung nation states vying for resources for their citizens, this metal and its contribution to the movement of the center of power will have dramatic consequences for generations to come. If history were to provide any insight, the lessons need to be carefully paid heed to for those of today and for those yet to come.

The Copper age: defining culture

While not present in all parts of the world and being chronologically staggered in some places, this age was associated with the first evidential understanding of the smelting process for copper. The emergence of metallurgy seems to have occurred first, in the fertile crescent, in present day Iraq, around the 6th millennium BCE. Emerging from the stone age, and starting to form banded groups of tribes, what the discovery of this process gave in collusion with the changes in the lifestyle of humans, was the need to have an identity as a group of individuals. To be able to recognize each other and validate each other as being from the same community, the cultural concepts of customizable tokens — jewelry — came up. In addition, it was used as an expressive creation between people — mother and child, partners, and friends. It was thus one of the first indicated uses of the metal. But the same sense of identity gave rise to the need for securing food for ‘one of us’, and for protecting ‘one of us’. Therefore, the invention of arrow heads and spear tips to inflict maximum damage on that was which either desired (food) or not desired (enemies), came a close second in pivotal inventions in this age. Thus, the copper age can be said to have given civilizations, such as the Mesopotamian and Indus-Valley civilizations, the impetus to develop further, a sense of common culture among its people.

The Bronze age: commerce becomes necessary

Evidently, the distribution of metals across the world is inhomogeneous. This was perhaps partly the reason why the metal ages were not always ubiquitous. Coincidentally, two factors led to the bronze age — the discovery of the alloying process for tin, arsenic and other metals, and the need to procure objects and materials in exchange of those that one had. Both can be traced to the heterogeneous distribution of resources on the planet. The use of limited sources of heat meant that the temperatures that could be created in pottery kilns was limited. Tin, with a low melting point of 1085 C, happened to be one of the metals that could be actually melted in the existing kilns. Therefore when it was discovered that the two metals could be melted, it was conceived that they could also be mixed. And when that was done, the new material — Bronze — demonstrated much better robustness characteristics than copper. But the distribution of copper and tin in the world were not contiguous, so commerce became necessary to be able to create this new kind of material. In addition, as new objects were created with these two metals — copper and bronze — the desire to exchange them for other goods that one was not in possession of, increased. These set of circumstances significantly propelled trade across civilizations. As trade fluorished, so did the possibility of larger congregation of people in given geographies, invoking the need for places for storage, robust architectural needs and the capacity to make note of all the transactions between the numerous people. This lead to the emergence of more codified forms of writing during the Bronze age — some of which we know today as the Cuneiform scripts (Mesopotamian), Hieroglyphic scripts (Egyptian) and the still undeciphered Harappan script (Indus valley civilization). However, with the close proximity between people, this age ended with a widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC, due to diseases [A], natural disasters, and the increased desire to conquer. It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many civilizations and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers. The lack of reliable sourcing of food for the larger communities — agriculture — was one reason why the societies weren’t always sustainable. This was not resolved until the discovery of iron smelting. The weather played additional truant to this problem and through earthquakes, droughts, and floods significantly modified the environment to warrant mass migrations or extinctions of civilizations. Parts of this seem eerily familiar in today’s age.

The Iron age: addiction to conquest

With the previous Bronze age having been often abruptly disrupted, there was a dire need to have the capacity to produce reliable amounts of food from the land. Pure physical labor was not scalable for these levels of needs and had to wait for agriculture to be performed at scales not seen before. But the trade had also introduced people to riches from other lands and thus the desire to expand and amass what others had. The shortage and inhomogeneous distribution of tin and trade disruptions caused by frequent small-scale militaristic encounters, forced metalworkers to seek an alternative to bronze. The earliest evidence for smelting iron can be seen in present day Turkey and India, dating back to around 2000 BCE. The discovery of the iron smelting process helped create stronger tools, and made agricultural work easier and more efficient. Peasants were able to cultivate harder soil, which made it possible to grow new types of plants, and the same was true with cattle breeding. In essence, it helped free up time for the people to engage in other activities — creative or economic. With more time and resources available, the age of conquest began with large armies swarming the world and assimilating territories in frequent large-scale conflicts. The Assyrians and Persians were on the move, and so were many numerous smaller tribes of present day India, the latter who together gave rise to the eventual Vedic period in India. Although, the iron age did not ‘officially’ have a transition to a new age, the time is ripe for stating our movement towards a new one. In particular, since it has been associated with a fourth C — control.

Welcome to the Lithium Age.

Lithium age: one metal to rule them all

Lithium, discovered in 1817 by the Swedish chemist, Johan August Arfwedson, is a silvery white metal that reacts violently with water and is so volatile that it is only found in compounds in nature. It is one of the most abundant metals in Earth’s crust, but very unevenly distributed geographically — again, reminds us of the inhomogeneous distribution of the Bronze age. The first industrial production of Lithium was in 1923 by the German company Metallgesellschaft in Langelsheim, using a type of lithium-bearing mineral called zinnwaldite. Soon after, production started in the US as it found early use in submarines, as an absorber of carbon dioxide. So what’s all this brouhaha about the metal anyway? Well, it is a light weight material with a high electrochemical potential, making it very attractive for batteries. Without needing to go into too many details of why batteries have become an important component of most present day technologies — from mobile phones to cars — it suffices to say that, as the Earth’s population grows, consumption grows, and so do the energy requirements. This means increased electronics and electricity storage needs. In 2021, for example, the average annual amount of electricity sold to (purchased by) a U.S. residential electric-utility customer was 10,632 kWh, an average of about 886 kWh per month [C]. Evidently, we not only need energy, often transmitted and used in the form of electricity, but also a way to store it. That is where Lithium comes in.

Let us take the example of electric cars. In theory, we could run every car on lithium batteries for a billion years, with the amount of lithium in the earth’s crust. But that is not realistic as it still needs to be mined, and thereafter processed into a form used for batteries — lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide — without impurities that could cause the battery to catch fire. In his eye-opening book — Volt Rush — Henry Sanderson, talks about the extreme leverage that lithium (and other important elements like cobalt, nickel and copper) has on how the financial, political, and military power are centered in the new world order. That, in essence is the power of lithium — control of the world order. In the present age, lithium producing cities have become the 21st century equivalent of the refineries, pipelines and ships that supported the age of oil-based transport. For example, although China mines only a fraction of the world’s lithium, it processes more than 80% into batteries, compared to the 1% of the US, with over 70% of the new battery cell capacity being built in China. This implies that pretty much all of the electronics that the rest of the world depends on, passes through limited geopolitical ‘fences’. This is an example of centralized control of power. Control over economics, control over resources, control over political influence, control over technological development, in fact, even control over privacy. Imagine if the use of lithium from certain sources demands that a backdoor be put in to the electronics — privacy goes out of the window. Thus, whosoever rules access to lithium, pretty much controls a lot of the world order. Given the extreme concentration of power, there must surely be dark sides to this age, other than the geopolitical volatilities mentioned earlier.

Lithium: the shiny metal with dark tidings*

The way a lot of today’s lithium is processed is as follows — take for example the case of a Tesla car battery. A grey rock mined in Australia containing only 6% lithium is shipped down the Yangtze river and then trucked to a plant in a remote countryside factory in China, to be heated to 1000 C, and then leached with acid, dried, and purified into a fine white powder that is later mixed with other metals to make the Li-ion battery, and eventually put in Tesla’s more powerful batteries, at costs of $9/kg. Remember also that in this way of lithium extraction, two tonnes of coal are needed to produce one tonne of lithium. Brine evaporation is another way of extracting lithium, but it has lower ore percentages. Digging up lithium ore rock in Australia and roasting it in China has a carbon footprint that is 6–7x higher than the lithium from Chile or Argentina, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence — making lithium in China as the most carbon-dioxide intense process in the world. And while an electric vehicle could still reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions over its lifetime compared to a gasoline/petrol car, water consumption issues during the mining need to be considered. It’s the case of ‘carbon-whack-a-mole’ — we eliminate the CO2 emissions from burning gasoline, but substitute them for emissions elsewhere.

In fact, lithium is the central metal that holds the solar system of other metals of this age in orbit. What are the other metals? The average electric car contains 83 kg of copper, over three times the amount in a gasoline-powered one. If each of the one billion cars currently on the road were to be replaced with a Tesla Model X, demand for cobalt would equal fourteen million tonnes — twice the size of the current global reserves. So where can we get cobalt from? It turns out there are many mines, such as the ones in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), like Kolwezi. But since there is no armed conflict in Kolwezi, cobalt is not called a ‘conflict material’, unlike tin, tantalum, and tungsten, which require disclosure under the US Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. The thousands of men, women, and children who dig up cobalt around Kolwezi represent the forgotten bottom nodes of the global supply chains. By the time cobalt from here is being supplied to smartphone companies, children represent an estimated 40% of the individual cobalt miners. This is the logic of global supply chains. Their complexity means that their true environmental and social costs are kept hidden. It is an example of how our continued consumption of goods imposed what Peter Dauvergne calls ‘ecological shadows of consumption’ onto distant communities and poorer people. As Emmanuel Umpula says:

‘It is a major paradox of the digital era that some of the world’s richest, most innovative companies are able to market incredibly sophisticated devices without being required to show where they source raw materials for their components,’

- Emmanuel Umpula, executive director of African Resources Watch.

Environmental challenges are not just about emissions. They are about resource consumption. Emissions are a symptom of rampant resource consumption. If we do not get resource consumption under control, we will not get emissions under control. Peter Dauvergne says:

‘Not only is environmentalism failing to produce sustainable patterns of global consumption, much of what policy makers in high consuming economics are labeling as environmental progress, is in reality little more than the wealthy world deflecting consequences and risks into ecosystems and onto people with less power — and thus less influence over the global affairs.’

- Peter Dauvergne, Professor, University of British Columbia

But all is not lost. We are an intelligent species that has shown time and again that in adversity, we can often end up uniting and doing good. So where do we go from here now? The acknowledgment of us having entered a new metal age is the first step. Thereafter, we need to pay close attention to the lessons from the other metal ages. Here are the key takeaways from the other ages:

1. A new technology that enables a sense of common cultural identity can go a long way in bringing communities together (Copper age)
2. The climate can upend even the most advanced civilizations of their time (Bronze age)
3. There may be offshoots of technological innovation that significantly ameliorate human cultural lives (Bronze age)
4. Earth’s resources while offering much for everyone’s need, do not also have much to offer for everyone’s greed — at some point, everyone will be affected (Bronze age)
5. Feats of human genius and innovation can often help overcome problems afflicting society (Iron age)
6. Human society goes in cycles: Quoting G. Michael Hopf, ‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ As collaboration and integration increased from the copper to bronze age, the egoistic desire to conquer increased in the iron age. The lithium age will see that culminate as a desire for control and power. After which, the cycle will restart. (Copper, Bronze, Iron ages)

It is never too late to learn from our mistakes as a species. What is the need of the hour if we are all to survive as a species on this planet is a concerted, honest and sincere effort on the part of major companies, governments and us individuals, to realize that we are one connected web and take wise actions based on that knowledge. As individuals, we have the power to influence this through our votes and our spending habits — think about it. As Chief Seattle said:

“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”

*All figures about metal mining and processing including names of companies are obtained from the book Volt Rush by Henry Sanderson.

(Disclaimer: all views expressed in this are my own and do not represent those of any organization that I may be affiliated with)

Bibliography:

A. Norrie P. How Disease Affected the End of the Bronze Age. A History of Disease in Ancient Times. 2016 Jun 26:61–101. doi: 10.1007/978–3–319–28937–3_5. PMCID: PMC7123324.

B. Kovác L. The 20 W sleep-walkers. EMBO Rep. 2010 Jan;11(1):2. doi: 10.1038/embor.2009.266. PMID: 20033082; PMCID: PMC2816633.

C. U. S. Energy Information Administration (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3)