Yeah, it did, because people smelted the natural copper ores that have tin or arsenic in them.That is not the same as deliberately producing bronze, and the scale of those early bronze artifact production was much smaller.so let's say one place which had those ores on the ground would produce the bronze instruments, whereas all the other places around could not.What would be the impact of that happening? Pretty much negligient.Otherwise, why would actual smelting of different ores start only at around 3000 BCE (when bronze-age civilizations were already there?)

As for downplaying - in my opinion it's you who downplay a drastic change in human civilization that happened with agriculture. Raising crops and cattle allowed for a completely different way of living, with smelting bronze from separate ingridients (so you could combine much more abundant copper with tin and arsenic, instead of looking for a very rare natural combination of both), trade, and food surplus that lead to people being more specialized.

All you hunter-gatherer society fans say is that somehow life in those times was better, because people were all equally living in precarious conditions.
Sure, maybe early settlers in agricultural societies were not that happy with their life, but they had way less problems every year with food shortages, had some kind of state to protect them, and were capable of creating city culture, which we are all part of now.
While hunter-gatherers could be wiped by a hostile tribe at every given moment, every winter-spring could lead to starvation, and the amount of resources to spend on anything except survival was miniscule

Thanks for your story, it's really wholesome but funny

What to you mean? Sure, they "held regular seasonal meetings where multiple groups would converge on a single ritual site" but how that means they did not need caravans?

Do you even know from where the ingridients for bronze were brought from in bronze age? all the way from turkey and afganistan.
How do you imagine hunter-gatherers carrying rocks from afganistan to egypt or middle east for no reason?
Why do you think bronze age had bronze? Because they had resources to direct to metal works. What resources? Food and time for people who dedicated themselves to metalworks. The hunter gatherers just could not invest the required effort for researching how to work metals. Only something like golden nuggets, or maybe sometimes using meteor iron. But there is a catch - there is too little of both for everyone. So gold/iron knife or arrow point remained a local and very treasured tool - but never led to other metals in hunter-gatherer societies

I'd rather talk in terms of existence of high concentrations of people. If the level of technology is maintained by a small, 30 person isolated community - then i guess it's the level of technology the above poster is talking about. This is bone, leather, stone tools, an occasional copper or gold knife, and so on.

Bronze is much more high-tech, because it requires 3 different ores, from different regions, which means trade needs to happen, which means there should be cities for sending caravans over to

Looks like Hecate on the door

Why break it before it's done freezing. Annoying

You can imagine this in almost every corner of post soviet Union, from baltuc states to vladivostok and south of Kazakhstan

Afaik, the first proto-mammals were therapsids, which were not that small. However, most mammals (or all?) I can't remember - came from rodent-like creatures after the cretaceous extinction event 65 mil ago. But that time insects were definitely even smaller...

Well, that was maybe 250 mln years ago, and mammals only appeared maybe 80-100 mil years ago, when insects were already closer to today in size