I know its a old point but it is really striking just how much of world history is reconceived in technological terms. Colonialism is often read as, as they put it in Civ 5, the triumph of “muskets over spears”, when really this was not how any of the involved generals perceived it at the time. Colonial wars were hard won, the natives were not crushed. During the invasion of (what we now call) South America, Cortez himself wrote about his fear and bewilderment at the Aztec’s weapons (which were made out of stone, despite their advanced metallurgy) for being remarkably effective against their cavalry. In 1899 John Ardagh, a British colonial administrator conducting a campaign in the Phillipines, turned up to the Hague on the day they ruled the use of expanding bullets a war crime to make a breathless argument that (get this) regular bullets don’t work on Phillipinos! (He was laughed out of the trial, nach.)
But people also extend it to the succession of the bronze age over the stone age, and the iron age over the bronze age - the bronze weapons just couldn’t compete with the iron ones, we tend to think. This is not true in any case, as far as I know. It would actually be quite late in the iron age that iron weapons would surpass bronze ones in terms of quality. The reasoning was a little more like the succession of LCD screens over CRT ones - ease of use and distribution, etc. In particular, bronze was greatly restricted by access to the ‘tin belt’, a slim region in South East asia which was the only part of the world where tin was available outside of the Americas. Countries closer to the tin belt were the first to enter the bronze age and typically the last to leave it.
Early iron weapons kinda sucked, actually. Soft iron is bendy, hard cast iron is brittle as glass. Some soft iron could be on par with bronze, but mostly on small blades like axes and spearheads. Sword blades were relatively long, so you could get enough leverage to really bend them badly.
Bronze offered the best combination of hardness and durability until some clever smiths in a couple locations figured out how to make iron into steel, which is basically perfect.
Steel is hard and tough and springy, but most of all, it’s controllable. Changing a few additives, or slightly altering the heat treatment, can give you the exact performance you ask for. Modern high-alloy supersteels are like magic.
Aluminum is good for stage props, but an aluminum sword has few benefits over bronze except light weight, and that only useful for some types of blade that depend on velocity to cut.
Titanium blades actually kinda suck. It’s extremely tough and durable, but that makes it extremely difficult to forge, or even grind. Ask any knifemmaker, titanium fucking eats abrasives.
Flint and obsidian are actually superb for making blades. The edge can be astoundingly thin and smooth at a microscopic level, and even good steel looks like a saw at that level. They make great surgical scalpels, they even cause less scarring.
That’s why the macuahuitl, a sort of wooden sword edged with obsidian, allegedly decapitated Spanish horses with a single blow. It was made with a special flaking method called prismatic flaking, which produced long, consistent, replaceable razor blades.
Cortez had a good reason to be afraid.
Conchoidal fracture in microcrystalline silicates produces pretty sharp edges, be it obsidian or chert/flint.
