the.com/iron age
When humans upgraded from bronze to stabbing each other more efficiently.
means The period, starting roughly 1200 BCE in different places at different times, when people learned to smelt iron and make tools and weapons from it instead of bronze.
from "Iron" traces back through Old English "īren"/"īsern," probably borrowed from a Celtic source and ultimately from Proto-Germanic — possibly related to words for "holy metal" or tied to place-names, though the deeper trail goes cold. The phrase "Iron Age" itself is an 19th-century archaeological label, part of the three-age system (Stone, Bronze, Iron) devised to sort prehistory by the material people cut each other up with.
- start date
- roughly 1200 BCE, give or take a collapse
- key tech
- smelting iron ore hot enough to actually work it
- bronze age cause
- ended partly because tin trade routes collapsed
- legacy
- cheaper, stronger tools than bronze, everywhere at once