Technology Gold

Technology Gold

how uncanny is it that ancient people picked gold and silver to be precious metal and they are...?

...still precious today?
Isn't this uncanny! Many many many centuries ago when humans had little technology, they somehow decided and also agreed that gold and silver were valuable, regardless which continent they resided on. Today, with advanced technologies, we can prove that they were right. How did they know those metals were precious back then? Why didn't they randomly pick some "rare" crap due to the lack of technology and thought it was precious, and then after many centuries, new technologies enabled us to get a lot of this crap and made it truly crap? as if someone told the ancient folks across the globe about what's precious and what's not...

People throughout history have made beautiful ornaments to wear as jewelry, signs of status, and so on. These items were made from all kinds of things, from pretty rocks to bird feathers. Most of them were quickly destroyed over time, but a few survived. They were valued by early humans, not just because of their beauty, but because they took valuable time and skill to craft, and conveyed status.

People quickly noticed that a few elements lasted almost forever. Gold is the prime example. The ability of gold to stay pristine over centuries seemed magical to early humans. Combined with the rarity of gold, this gave that shiny metal enormous prestige. It even became associated with heath and longevity, as evidenced by the centuries-old fascination with alchemy. (Isaac Newton spent a lot of his time working on alchemical projects.) Another peculiarity of gold is that is can be easily "worked", into extremely fine wires, plates, gold "leaf", and so on. No other available metal can do this.

Finally, note that there are only a few metals that can be obtained in their native form by early humans. Gold, silver, copper, mercury, tin and lead are among the few that can be easily smelted or actually gathered as the pure element. Elements like platinum, aluminum, titanium (etc) were simply unavailable.

So the value of gold, from early days, was determined by

1) the availability of pure metal;
2) scarcity;
3) valuable properties (eg, corrosion resistance, ease of workability).

There was really very little "random" about the choice. No other elements match gold for those attributes.