The oldest known mine was dug for red paint over 40,000 years ago
In the hills of Eswatini, Paleolithic people dug into the Ngwenya Mine to extract hematite, which they turned into the red pigment ochre. Radiocarbon dating puts the workings at roughly 41,000 to 43,000 years old, making it the oldest mine yet found, and in Hungary sites of similar age may have been worked by Neanderthals.
Mining supplies whatever cannot be grown or made in a factory: metals, coal, gemstones, salt, gravel and clay, and in a broader sense oil, gas and even water. Neolithic miners around 4000 to 3000 BC chased seams of flint through chalk with shafts and galleries, as at Grimes Graves in England and Krzemionki in Poland. Egyptians gathered bright green malachite at Maadi for decoration, later sent expeditions abroad for turquoise and copper, and worked the vast gold mines of Nubia, crushing ore to powder and washing out the dust.
In Greece, the silver mines of Laurium underpinned Athens, worked by over 20,000 enslaved people using techniques little changed since the Bronze Age. The Romans industrialised the craft. Aqueducts fed great tanks at the minehead; releasing a full tank sent a torrent that stripped away soil and exposed gold-bearing rock, a method called hushing. Miners then heated the rock with fire and doused it with water so it cracked. At Las Medulas in Spain, seven long aqueducts sluiced alluvial gold, and at Rio Tinto sixteen paired water-wheels, turned by miners treading on them, lifted water about 24 metres out of the copper workings.
Medieval demand for iron soared with horseshoes, stirrups and armour, knights sometimes carrying up to 45 kilograms of it. Water was the constant enemy. By 1465 mines had grown so deep that shafts could no longer be pumped dry, triggering a silver crisis. Georg Agricola's De re metallica of 1556 set out, among much else, how to drain flooded shafts, and mechanical and animal-powered pumps later transformed the industry. In 1627 miners at Banska Stiavnica, now in Slovakia, first used black powder for blasting, far faster than fire-setting.
Modern mining runs from prospecting and profit analysis through extraction to restoring the land afterward. Its costs include polluted water, lost habitat and displaced communities, and although most countries regulate it, enforcement often lags where remote towns depend on the jobs.
Source: Mining
