| > "Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!" It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0]. The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting. [0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/... (under "3.1.3 Bronzes of the Late Bronze Age II") [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01921-7 ("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23") |