Why was copper the first metal to be smelted?

Copper was likely the first metal to be smelted because it could be easily reduced from its oxide minerals using charcoal in a fire at temperatures exceeding 700 °C (1,300 °F).12

Before the development of smelting, early humans were already familiar with native copper, which they shaped through cold-working and annealing to create hand tools like knives and axes. This familiarity with the metal's properties, combined with the observation that heating copper-bearing minerals yielded a greater amount of metal, facilitated the transition to extracting copper from ore. In contrast, other metals like iron required significantly higher temperatures and more complex furnace technology to process, making them much more difficult for early toolmakers to fabricate.1342