Bronze to Iron Age

Tin was hard to come by in those days and necessary for bronze. Late bronze age led to civilizational collapse and trade networks that distributed tin broke down. Iron was more abundant and could be more useful by itself than copper alone. May have been used for farm implements at first.

It seems that iron smelting preceded the bronze age in the middle east by several hundred years. Early iron wasn’t very good metal and it made sense sticking to bronze as long as you could afford it and had access to tin and copper)

At the end of the bronze age there was a shortage of tin to create the bronze (with copper). This caused the beginning of the iron age as people were looking for alternatives to bronze and once tin was back in the market it was not valuable anymore. The whole process was coincided with falling of civilisations, disruption of trade and general reorganisation of world powers, so expect some of that.

You're absolutely right. Though I don't understand why this idea persists - even in academic scholarship. It has been proven decades ago that non-meteoric iron was smelted in the Early Bronze Age. Though the main reason bronze was used for so long appears to be because it was actually cheaper than iron. Smelting iron required the burning of an absurd amount of trees, which was extremely expensive.

1. Once you know how to make a hot enough furnace, iron is cheaper to make than bronze. Instead of finding copper and tin ore separately, you just need red rocks and a whole lot of trees. Quantity can trump quality.2. There was steel in use already prior to 1000BC. High Carbon steel was being produced in both Europe and Asia by 400 BC. When people say "the iron age" it includes the usage of steel (which is mostly iron).

A dash of luck! Really no way to know, and anyone who tells you they know probably doesn't. It's still fun to guess. Consider a fire pit lined with rocks. Perhaps an observant fire watcher begins to notice the rocks seem to change over time and separate, or a toolmaker decides to use one type of stone with a particularly good edge and a low luster. The discovery of bronze fascinates me more than iron, especially since its usage generally predates iron. Bronze needed someone to not only

I find a similar analogy in the idea of the bronze age vs iron age. It's not as if people in the bronze age didn't know how to make iron or even steel goods; but it was really, really damn expensive. It just wasn't cost effective until they found new methods of production and/or new energy sources to fuel those methods of production.

I believe iron is actually in the same ballpark as bronze. The benefit is more one of availability -- if you have the technology to handle iron, you don't need to go around and find sources for both tin and copper. And of course you might accidentally invent steel.

Can anyone explain iron - unless it is steel (which was not a common knowledge trough history) it is worse than bronze in every aspect. So what lead to the iron age?

I was about to say this. Iron smelting was a later invention, but once it was discovered, it's actually significantly easier to smelt iron than bronze, even if you start from zero (i.e. knowledge only, no tools), due to the geographical scarcity of tin. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyGLE0usN_ISo you can easily say bronze requires a more advanced civilization than