Artifacts attributed to the Diquis culture of Costa Rica, dated 300 BC - 1500 AD

Sibero-Scythian gold

Did you know Britain kickstarted the Bronze age?

The oldest evidence of tin ore mining in Europe is in Britain.

Around 2200 BC Britain's Beaker folk switched from using copper tools, to tin rich Bronze and the rest of Europe followed afterwards. Britain started Europe's Bronze Age.

tin-Bronze was in use earlier in Anatolia (3000 BC), and relied first on meagre local tin deposits but later on tin mines in Central Asia, but even in 2200 BC, half the metal objects in Anatolia were still just made of copper.

But later on, even West Asia switched to using British tin, and it became the main producer of tin ingots for all the Mediterranean.

You're welcome.

Details of the pressblech foils used to decorate a 7th century sword scabbard found in a male burial at Gutenstein, Baden-Wurttemberg,, Germany. It depicts a were-wolf warrior of Wotan.

This is a copy held at the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart. The original was (like many other early medieval treasures) looted by the red army from Berlin in 1945 and is now held in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

Photos by Matt Bunker