UPSC 2020 - History
Copper Age
In your one year strategy for civil services exams, you can’t neglect history, especially ancient
history.
If you go through ancient history, you will find a major transition in the way of living and more importantly in using tools and weapons.
The various divisions in ancient history are based on what kind of things people used to build their tools and weapons.
Earlier, people used stones as a medium for creating tools, weapons and much more. But then people started the practice of agriculture with the help of stone tools.
Historians named it as the Neolithic period, meaning new stone age.
After this, bronze came into existence.
This led to a revolution in the usage of tools and weapons.
This period of using Bronze as a medium was known as the Bronze age.
Since the early humans transitioned into a new period, their efforts led to a series of experiments,innovation, and failures in the creation of a society that could rely on the usage of bronze.
Historians name the period when people started using metals for making their lives easier as the Chalcolithic period.
You must know that similar to the Stone Age and Bronze Age, Copper
Age too led to some social and cultural changes which highly affected the way of living.
Onset Of Copper Age
If you go through the NCERT books, you will find that the Copper Age was considered to be a time that saw a huge socio-cultural change.
However, the changes didn’t spread in a short span of time.
There is evidence that tells how
some people never adopted metal usage and preferred living in the same as in the Stone age.
It is believed that the changes in using the metals began in the eastern parts of Mediterranean regions.
It was the end of the 5th millennium BCE during the copper age.
The climate, which was quite great for agriculture from the Mesolithic age, started getting dry due to the extreme climate changes.
This led to a considerable decrease in agriculture.
Perhaps, that's why a major population returned to their earlier lifestyle of hunting and gathering.
Since people didn't give up taming animals, a practice of pastoral ranching became widespread instead of agriculture and farming.
This gradually led to a sense of competition among the people.
most of them got busy making the most use of the available resources.
But it was due to the competition that people started using better and more efficient tools people preferred metal rather than stones.
Amidst the usage of different metals, Gold became popular.
But eventually, people realized that gold was quite soft and delicate yet pretty.
Therefore, Gold was seen as a metal that could be used for jewelry.
People used copper for making tools, weapons and other necessary equipment.
For that reason, it was easy to heat and give the desired shapes. also, copper seemed to be a stronger metal.
This helped the ancient people to have new and better tools.
Social Changes In Copper Age
The Copper Age is said to have existed from 3500 BC to 2300 BC.
As said above, people started using copper for several purposes.
The most common use was for making agriculture tools.
Later they used copper for construction purposes as well.
It is not that people didn't use stone.
To defend their resources and maintain their competition, people used weapons made up of coppers.
This somewhere led to reputation among the warriors. Common people saw them as elite and protectors so that was all about copper age.
We hope this will help you!