In 2013, archaeologist Miljana Radivojević and colleagues reported in Antiquity a tin-bronze foil from Pločnik, Serbia dated to roughly 4650 BCE — some 1,500 years earlier than the Near Eastern bronze long assumed to be the world's first, and evidence that Europe developed bronze-making on its own. Neither copper nor tin alone was strong enough for a lasting blade or tool, but melted together at the right ratio they became an alloy harder than either metal by itself. Greek myth remembers the smith-god Hephaestus forging weapons for the gods, while Chinese legend describes Chiyou, a bronze-headed warlord said to have forged the first metal weapons — two civilizations independently mythologizing the same discovery. Sometimes the strongest thing is not one material perfected alone, but two imperfect things combined.