Many products make life easier: soap, paint, glue, charcoal, rubber...

But you will not find them (in pure form) in nature.
There are operations required to natural substances and minerals to make them (more) suitable for its intended use. Heating or distillation techniques are commonly used.

There are multiple and different possibilities. Depending on the materials and tools, and insights and experiences that our ancestors had, they managed to organize better and better in a more efficient production.
Now we have many industrialized and automated processes, and we lost the know-how of our ancestors.

We try in this section to collect as much of that knowledge to keep it.