The Balkans; The Iron Age
The first signs of iron use come from Ancient Egypt and Sumer, where around 4000 B.C. small items, such as the tips of spears and ornaments, were being fashioned from iron recovered from meteorites. By 3000 B.C. to 2000 B.C. increasing numbers of smelted iron objects (distinguishable from meteoric iron by the lack of nickel in the product) appear in Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley (Pakistan and North India) during the Mesopotamian wars of the Early Dynastic period.
The early 1st millennium B.C. marks the Iron Age in Eastern Europe. The earliest migrations we can reconstruct from historical sources are those of the 2nd millennium BC. It is speculated that the Proto-Indo-Iranians began their expansion from ca. 2000 BC, the Indo-Aryan migration reaching Assyria in the west and the Punjab in the east by ca. 1500 BC. Agriculture spread to Old Europe south of the Mediterranean climate. In the Late Bronze Age, the Aegean and Anatolia were overrun by moving populations, summarized as the Sea Peoples, leading to the collapse of the Hittite Empire and ushering in the Iron Age.
By 1600 B.C. to 1200 BC, iron was used increasingly in the Middle East, but did not supplant the dominant use of bronze, thus (Iron) the heaviest element which does not require a supernova or similarly cataclysmic event for its formation. It is therefore the most abundant heavy metal in the universe. The Black and Red Ware culture was another early Iron Age archaeological culture of the northern Indian Subcontinent. The earliest known production of steel occurred around 1400 B.C. in North Africa where steel was being produced in carbon furnaces.
Colchian culture (circa 1200 to 600 BC) is a late Bronze Age and Iron Age culture of the western Caucasus, mostly in western Georgia.
The Cimmerians start settling the steppes of southern Russia and collapse of Hittite power in Anatolia with the destruction of their capital Hattusa. It was succeeded by the Koban (Northern Ossetia) culture in northern and central Caucasus. In the steppes north of the Black Sea and Azov Sea and the Caucasus, the Iron Age begins with the Koban (1100 BCE-400BCE) and the pre-Scythian Chernogorovka and Novocerkassk cultures from ca. 900 BC. By 800 BC, it was spreading to Hallstatt C ( 800BCE-600 BCE Central Europe) via the alleged Thraco-Cimmerian migrations. It is sometimes assumed that the migration of the Cimmerians was triggered by an Iranian expansion, from the area of the former Srubna culture of Late Bronze Age (16th-12th centuries BC), into the steppes of what is now the Ukraine. is a successor to the Yamna culture, the Catacomb culture and the Abashevo culture.
Iron and copper working then continued to spread southward through the continent, reaching the Cape around 200 A.D. The widespread use of iron revolutionised the Bantu farming communities of over 400 different ethnic groups in Africa who adopted it, driving out the stone tool using hunter-gatherer societies they encountered as they expanded to farm wider areas of savannah. The technologically superior Bantu spread across southern Africa and became rich and powerful, producing iron for tools and weapons in large, industrial quantities. The Bantu first originated around the Benue-Cross rivers area in southeastern Nigeria and spread over Africa to the Zambia area. Sometime in the second millennium BC, perhaps due to pressure from people migrating away from the drying Sahara and into the region, they were forced to expand into the rainforests of central Africa. Iron working was introduced to Europe around 1000 BC, probably from Asia Minor and slowly spread westwards over the succeeding 500 years. About 1,000 years later the Bantu began a more rapid second phase of expansion beyond the forests into southern and eastern Africa. In Zimbabwe a major southern hemisphere empire was established, with its capital at Great Zimbabwe.