[chmod775]

Given need, access to anything that might serve as string, pieces of wood, and too much time to think about the problem, most singular humans will come up with that within the year, if not within days.

That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.

Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.

[mattlondon]

I think it is several steps up and beyond from hitting rocks together.

You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in this story there was some sort metallurgy involved to create the alloy, so that likely involves working with ores etc (mining, identifying, processing etc etc).

There are a lot of steps. You can't just find a random "vine" to wrap snuggly and securely around a random thing you find to use as a drill bit that is like 1cm in diameter - you'll need something of consistent size and highly flexible for the string, similar for the drill bit needs to be the right size and so on.

The next step up from banging rocks together is probably using sharp stone chips as scrapers or crude knives. Even napped stone axes are quite difficult to create and require skill, even if the raw components are literally laying around.

I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.

[chmod775]

> You need to create string.

That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools.

Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use.

These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they had contact/trade with neighboring Asia and there's evidence of flax processing in Georgia another 30k years earlier.

> I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.

It took us maybe a few days of experimenting to finally figure out as boys. We used some modern string, random sticks, and an assortment of materials to try to start a fire with. It's harder than it seems, but not much so if you're determined. If some bored 8 year olds can do it, then so can anyone of any era.

I don't think the linage of anyone for whom that was truly so unattainable would have survived to this day.

[gehsty]

Alloying copper with silver and lead is sophisticated. How could they have got to this without structured research, experimentation, controlled manufacturing. It’s a lot closer to our drill bits now than a sharpened bone.

[adrian_b]

It is likely that only silver was the intended alloying element.

Except for native silver, which is very rare and usually mixed with gold, most silver is extracted from sulfides where it is mixed with lead (because silver ions and lead ions have the same size), so simple smelting will produce a mixture of silver and lead.

There are techniques of purifying the silver from the lead (i.e. "cupellation"), which were well known in later antiquity, but, at the time of early tools like this, probably the purification was not yet efficient.

The knowledge of the fact that pure metals are soft but mixing them makes hard metals is extremely ancient. Before learning this, metals could be used only for jewelry (except for very rare natural alloys, like the meteorites made of Fe-Ni-Co-Ge, which were the source of the oldest iron-based tools found in Egypt and elsewhere, thousands of years before the discovery of how to extract iron from its minerals).

Before discovering tin and the bronze made from copper and tin, which happened relatively recently, around the time when written history also began, for many thousands of years various weaker copper alloys were used, but which nonetheless were much harder than pure copper.

The metallurgy of 3 metals, lead, copper and gold, is very old, around ten thousand years or more. So more time has passed from the time when the techniques of smelting metals and making objects of them were first discovered until the discovery of other metals, e.g. silver and tin, and the diversification of metal-working techniques, than since that moment until the present.

There was a lot of time for refining the techniques used by smiths.

[ReptileMan]

But to make a drill bit of highly alloyed copper you need a bit more tools and knowledge

[vee-kay]

Do a web search for "Wootz steel", "Damascus blades" and "Iron pillars India". The ancient world certainly had expertise in advanced metallurgy. Wootz steel was actually nanotech.

[Brian_K_White]

Basic research is never silly.

[andrewflnr]

> Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.

True. Good thing no one is trying to do that.