Initially, it seems, in a "bloomery": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery which - apparently - functions at a temperature below the melting point, leads to a forgeable form of iron, and does not require a separate flux to be added. You just need charcoal and iron ore. So manageable as a first step.
I am not sure it was just that simple . First you have to find the right ore . I assume the starting process could have been in baking pottery and baking bricks , I believe backed brick idea come from from India. But I would like to hear other opinion . I appreciate your opinion the word evolution is much of hand waving ehich does not give much detail on human effort.
Since it followed bronze - an alloy of copper and tin, meaning they were each already in use - it seems only natural that people would continue attempting to smelt various minerals they found. So it doesn't strike me as a surprize that they hit upon iron when they did.
we also started by using meteorite iron i believe so one can assume that as this was fairly rare they sought other sources. they may have realized that this metal was attrated to magnetic rocks and so looked for similar rocks in nature that were also attracted. smelting would have been trial and error and working from known principles.
It is an interesting point . The Egyptian had some holy rocks that supposedly come from heaven .. I don't know How and were is magnetite available . An other thing are meteorite magnetic , or magnetized ? since they must have been hot as the entered into our atmosphere
The "trick" was to learn that Fe2O3 could have the Oxygen removed with hot carbon. This probably was an accident. I.e. They put some rocks high* in Fe2O3, around a wood fire to keep the wind out, and some, more than average observant, person noted some of the wind block rocks had changed. Ledgen has it that is the way glass was discovered. (Sailors built a fire on beach sand and used some of the cargo of soda (or salt?) in bags to block the wind.) Firestone´s discovery of volcanization of rubber was an accident too. He dropped some latex he had mixed sulpher in on hot cast iron stove. When some one pointed out the was "just lucky" he replied: "Yes, but luck favors a prepared mind." Same type accident story for Fleming´s discovery of penicillin. Or to paraphase Newon: Modern science is standing on the sholders of accidents. * Some of the iron ore Vale mines in open pits in Brazil is 95+% pure Fe2O3. - world´s best iron ore.
I have seen on how the bake bricks in a primitive way . The they put a layer of bricks and then a heavy layer of of wood and at the top they close , so no air from the top does not get sucked in and they heat it for several days. In essnce the wood becomes a charcoal in between the bricks. this is of course not to much different then a blast furnace .
In rural Brazil they still make low quality bricks that way. I have bought some for farm I had. They build a small hut, but big enough to stand in typically, with sun dried clay bricks. The top half of hut has a decreasing radius to completely close. The wood fire is inside the hut, and smolders for days. Only the inner most layer of clay bircks are much good but the outter ones will be done again in the next hut with others making the outside walls. I´m not sure, but think the also sell the charcoal produced too.
This is why I mentioned the early Iron process must have come from India because the baked brick started in India over 4000 years ago and the early European Iron age apparently about 1700 BC . To my recollection Israel did not nave iron tools before the king David , because the Philistine did not share with them.
An ancient Egyptian iron bead found inside a 5,000-year-old tomb was crafted from a meteorite, new research shows. The tube-shaped piece of jewelry was first discovered in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, roughly 40 miles (70 kilometers) south of Cairo. Dating between 3350 B.C. and 3600 B.C., beads found at the burial site represent the first known examples of iron use in ancient Egypt, thousands of years before Egypt's Iron Age. And their cosmic origins were suspected from the start. Soon after the beads were discovered, researchers showed that the metal jewelry was rich in nickel, a signature of iron meteorites. But in the 1980s, academics cast doubt on the beads' celestial source, arguing that the high nickel content could have been the result of smelting. [Fallen Stars: A Gallery of Famous Meteorites] Scientists from the Open University and the University of Manchester recently analyzed one of the beads with an electron microscope and an X-ray CT scanner. They say the nickel-rich chemical composition of the bead's original metal confirms its meteorite origins. What's more, the researchers say the bead had a Widmanstätten pattern, a distinctive crystal structure found only in meteorites that cooled at an extremely slow rate inside asteroids when the solar system was forming, according to Nature. Further investigation also showed that the bead was not molded under heat, but rather hammered into shape by cold-working. The first record of iron smelting in ancient Egypt comes from the sixth century B.C., and iron artifacts from before that time are quite rare, Nature reported. "Today, we see iron first and foremost as a practical, rather dull metal," study researcher Joyce Tyldesley, an Egyptologist at the University of Manchester, said in a statement. "To the ancient Egyptians, however, it was a rare and beautiful material which, as it fell from the sky, surely had some magical/religious properties." The iron beads' inclusion in burials also suggests this material was deeply important to ancient Egyptians, Tyldesley added. Strange as the find may seem, it's not the first time scientists have uncovered the cosmic origins of an ancient artifact. Back in September, German researchers found that a heavy Buddha statue brought to Europe by the Nazis was carved from a meteorite between the eighth and 10th centuries. They even linked it to a specific space rock — the Chinga meteorite, which scientists believe fell to Earth 10,000 to 20,000 years ago and left a scattering of space rocks around the Siberian and Mongolian border. The new research on the Egyptian bead was detailed on May 20 in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science. http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-egyptians-crafted-jewelry-meteorites-155809920.html
I just remembered why I bought a truck load of those cheap bricks. I make several small open top tanks near tiny creeks, that often went dry a day or so after the rain, for my cows to drink from so they did not need to walk down the hills to a larger stream to get a drink.
