Mining

Mining is digging that remembers where to dig. The transition from surface collecting to underground extraction required understanding that valuable materials continued beneath visible deposits, that tunnels could safely penetrate rock, and that labor invested in excavation would yield returns worth the effort. This shift from opportunistic gathering to systematic extraction marks humanity's first industrial activity.

The adjacent possible for mining required three elements: materials valuable enough to justify labor, stone or bone tools capable of excavating, and cognitive capacity to plan multi-step extraction. South Africa's Lion Cave, mined for red ochre pigment around 47,000 years ago, shows all three. Ochre was valuable for ritual and practical uses; Paleolithic tool technology was sufficient for soft rock excavation; and the mining itself required planning—shoring tunnels, organizing labor, processing ore.

The earliest mining was for pigments, not metals. Red ochre (hematite) dominated the archaeological record because it was soft enough to excavate with stone tools, obvious enough to recognize, and valuable enough for continuous effort. Only much later would mining target copper, gold, and eventually iron—each requiring higher temperatures to process, making smelting the rate-limiting step rather than extraction.

Mining created new social structures. A mine requires coordination that hunting and gathering do not: labor must be organized over days rather than hours; products must be stored rather than immediately consumed; trade networks must distribute materials far from their sources. The Lion Cave miners traded ochre across hundreds of kilometers, creating exchange networks that would persist and expand through human prehistory.

The activity also imposed environmental awareness. Successful mining demanded understanding of geology—where veins ran, how rock fractured, which formations indicated valuable deposits. This practical geology, learned through extraction rather than study, represented early systematic knowledge of earth processes.