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RE: Gold, cats, bitcoins and ...virtual reality
Very interesting, but...
Gold is found naturally in the form of metallic nuggets. Some quite large. It seems entirely possible to me that the ancients found gold nuggets both to collect (due to their shininess, weight and other unusual properties) and could even have been able to work them into a form potentially useful or interesting. This could very easily have happened at a time when extracting silver, iron, copper or other metals from ores into a usable form was not possible.
Thing is, the first findings that we know of (Spanish caves occupied by Paleolithic men / era ~40.000 BC) didn't involve nuggets, but gold flakes.
Then we fast forward to around 4500 BC with the bulgarian gold in a grave with items made from 98% purity gold (=refined/molten... note that nuggets in nature are a combination of soil particles and gold particles - with the soil particles acting like the "cement" of the nugget structure - reducing purity to 70-90%).
As far as I know, there is no historic step between these two points with malleable gold nuggets.
Malleable gold nuggets in the form of electrum (gold/silver naturally occurring alloy) were used much later, in Greece, for coinage. They were minting the coins directly on the electrum alloy. So the process is "backwards".
Okay but gold flakes could still be collected for their unusual properties, even if nothing were done with them in terms of manufacturing. And refining gold by melting it and separating it from dirt seems likely easier to me than chemically extracting metals from naturally-occurring ores.
The idea that we are programmed to like gold is interesting and even plausible, but I don't find anything unusual about gold use in some form or another predating other metals given the chemistry.
It seems easier only because we take access to high temps for granted. Yet even the melting part is mindblowingly difficult for the ancient people. You need temps of around 1100C to get gold in a proper liquid form. Now you don't get that kind of temps with sticks and woods. You don't have gas, you don't have diesel, you don't have hydrogen/oxygen torches or electric furnaces, so? At most you've realized the value of coal - and even that will not get you to 1100c. You'd need to be an expert in furnace design and ...guesswork. You see it's impossible to figure out what to do if you don't know the melting properties of gold and your temp deficit - since you also lack a temp reading. Also note that the first recorded use of coal (~4000bc China) is actually later than the first molten gold (~4500bc Bulgaria). It doesn't add up all around...