@Kyresti @starkatt Something a lot of people don't realize is that iron didn't beat out bronze in prehistory because it was necessarily *better*, it beat out bronze because it was *cheaper*. And then people eventually figured out how to process it right so that it *is* better than bronze, but that took a long while longer.
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more rambling about metallurgy because ????
@Kyresti Copper, tin, and arsenic (you can replace the tin in bronze with arsenic and get a material with very similar properties) are all fairly uncommon metals, but smelting them is very easy and can even be done (badly) in a campfire, and bronze is easily hammered back into shape if it gets bent. It's also really easy to make the alloy, just stick the molten metals together--or, as in the earliest cases, just smelt naturally co-occurring copper and tin-and/or-arsenic ores without realizing what you're doing
Iron on the other hand is incredibly common, but extracting it from its ores requires a higher temperature than you can get with an open flame, it absorbs carbon very readily which makes it increasingly brittle, and it work-hardens rapidly, so it can't be cold forged (at least not with iron-age technology) and you can't field-repair an iron tool that got bent too many times (bronze work-hardens too, but slower, and it's more malleable which makes it more conducive to cold forging)
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@Kyresti metallurgy always gets me rambly, sorry about that
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