native minerals

Native minerals are the minerals that occur in the Earth as pure elements, not as compounds — a rarer case among minerals, most of which are actually made of more than one element.

• Native metals include gold, silver, and copper, which is part of why they've been prized and worked by hand since ancient times — no chemical extraction was needed to get the pure metal.
• Native non-metals exist too, such as sulfur and carbon, found in their elemental form without needing to be combined with anything else.
• This makes native minerals unusual: they're the exception to the general rule that minerals are compounds, which is why gold can be called both a mineral and a metal at the same time.