This question splits into two genuinely different answers, depending on what's actually being asked. There's the very first time humans came across gold and started working it, buried somewhere in deep prehistory, and there's the much later pattern of specific deposits being found that set off some of history's most famous gold rushes. Both get described as gold being "discovered," even though they're separated by thousands of years.
Gold has a head start over most other metals when it comes to early human use, simply because it occurs naturally in metallic form, often as flakes or nuggets washed into riverbeds. There's no smelting or extraction required to get a usable piece, unlike metals locked inside ore. That made it one of the very first metals people could pick up, shape and wear without needing any real technology at all.
The earliest known gold artefacts come from the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria, where archaeologists have dated gold jewellery back to around 4,300 BC. Pieces this old place gold among the very oldest worked metals found anywhere, predating bronze and iron by a considerable margin.
Long before anyone thought to mint it into currency, gold was already deeply woven into the religious and royal life of ancient Egypt, used in burial treasures, ceremonial objects and jewellery for thousands of years. Its untarnishing shine made it an obvious symbol of permanence and status in a culture preoccupied with both.
Coinage came much later. The first pure gold coins were minted in Lydia, in what's now Turkey, under King Croesus, between roughly 561 and 547 BC. That shift, from gold as a raw material traded by weight to gold stamped and standardised as currency, marks one of the more significant turning points in how the metal was used.
Skip forward more than two thousand years, and "discovering gold" starts to mean something quite different: stumbling on a specific deposit large enough to draw thousands of people to a particular patch of land almost overnight.
A handful of these moments reshaped entire regions:
Each of these "discoveries" wasn't really the discovery of gold itself, since the metal had been sitting there for millions of years already. It was the discovery of where, specifically, to dig.
It's an odd quirk of language that the same word covers both a Bronze Age burial in eastern Europe and a creek bed in the Yukon five thousand years later. The earlier story is about humans first working out what gold even was. The later one is about locating deposits of a metal whose value was already completely understood.
A nugget pulled from a Klondike stream in 1896 and a ring made from recycled gold today are, chemically, the exact same material. Gold doesn't age the way organic materials do, and a piece's history, however old or recent, doesn't change what it's actually made of.
This is partly why gold jewellery handed down through a family can still be properly assessed today, whatever decade or century it originally came from. Our specialists look at what a piece is made of now, weight and purity included, rather than needing to know exactly where or when it was first worked.
Getting an item looked at is simple enough. A postage pack can be requested at no cost, or a collection arranged for a time that works for you, and from there your pieces go through proper in-house appraisal before one offer comes back covering everything you've sent. You're given a full two months to think it over, and if you'd rather not proceed, everything is returned without any cost to you.
Our FAQs page answers many of the smaller questions people have before sending anything off, and booking a home collection is there as an option if posting items isn't practical for you.
History aside, what matters most is what's actually in front of you right now, whether that's a single old ring or a whole drawer's worth of pieces collected over the years.