Chemical element native solid elements occur in alloys, such as that of iron and nickel. The history of the discovery and use of the elements began with primitive human societies that found native elements like carbon, sulfur, copper and gold. Later civilizations extracted elemental copper, tin, lead and iron from their ores by smelting, using charcoal. Alchemists and chemists subsequently identified many more; all of the naturally occurring elements were known by 1950. The properties of the chemical elements are summarized in the periodic table, which organizes the elements by increasing atomic number into rows ("periods") in which the columns ("groups") share
Extended periodic table and discovered that some elements indeed had different properties that break the established pattern, and a 2010 calculation by Pekka Pyykkö also noted that several elements might behave differently than expected. It is unknown how far the periodic table might extend beyond the known 118 elements, as heavier elements are predicted to be increasingly unstable. Glenn T. Seaborg suggested that the highest possible element may be under "Z" = 130, while Walter Greiner predicted that there may not be a highest possible element. There is currently no consensus on the placement of elements beyond atomic number 120 in the periodic