"Gold was the first metal to be sought by man; it is easy to work and, at first, was used only as an ornament.  Copper was next employed but not extensively until it was admixed with tin to make the harder bronze. The discovery of mixing copper and tin to make bronze was made by one of the Adamsonites of Turkestan whose highland copper mine happened to be located alongside a tin deposit." (904)

Matt Neibaur contributed the following review emanating from the University of Chicago.

    For the first time, researchers have found a local bronze-age source of tin in the Middle East, a discovery that proves that the metal that made the important alloy possible was not entirely imported from regions outside the area as had been thought, a University of Chicago archaeologist says. Assistant Professor, Aslihan Yener, in the University's Oriental Institute believes a mine and an ancient mining village she has found in the central Taurus mountains in Turkey demonstrate that tin mining was a well developed industry in the area as long ago as 2870 B.C. at the dawn of the bronze age. The site of the mine, Kestel, is about 60 miles north of Tarsus. Yener's work at the mine and at nearby Goltepe, an ancient miner's village, provides new insights into the development of the tin industry. Perhaps most important is her discovery that tin can be smelted at relatively low temperatures in crucibles. Other tin sites known to exist throughout the Mediterranean area could also have been sources of tin through the labor-intensive smelting the team recreated....

    Despite the importance of bronze and the role tin played in its production, scholars have long believed that tin was not readily available in the Middle East. Cuneiform texts on clay tablets speak of sources to the distant east and researchers have believed that perhaps Afghanistan was the only likely location of tin mines. Yener's discovery shows that tin came from local as well as imported sources. Yener's work is part of a study begun in 1980 to identify sources of metals used in the production of weapons and other objects in the ancient Near East. Yener, a American of Turkish descent, began her work as a member of the faculty of Bosporus University in Istanbul. "I had not set out to find tin," she said, "When I was being trained as an archaeologist, the standard view was that tin did not come from Turkey but from elsewhere during the bronze age....

    Although the researchers had found tin ore at Kestel, some skeptics thought there was not enough tin to prove that the mine was actually a tin mine. Working last summer with tin experts from Cornwall in southwestern England, an area famous for its tin deposits, Yener discovered industrial debris at the mining village of Goltepe (near Tarsus) that provided clues about how the tin was probably smelted. Instead of evidence of only low-grade tin, one ton of tin-slagged crucibles with a 30 percent tin content was discovered at Goltepe. This establishes beyond doubt that tin-metal was being produced, and was the motivation for the mining and smelting industry.   

[So have the authors of The Urantia Book made yet another lucky guess? Or are they what they say they are? Your choice. Ed.]