A new study dates that mine to a full 48,000 years ago ... spanning the final Middle Stone Age and the Late Stone Age, the cavern was mined for a clay-based pigmentation mineral called ochre.

It is the key ingredient of bronze, the alloy that helped create some of the world’s greatest civilizations and took humanity out of the stone age on its ... because copper mining uses acids ...

and Early Bronze Age. Fine-grained stone was quarried from hillsides in Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall and Northern Ireland. Mined flint is of better quality than surface flint. Mines are known in ...