The earliest man-made composite materials were straw and mud combined to form bricks for building construction. Ancient brick-making was documented by Egyptian tomb paintings.
Wattle and daub is one of the oldest man-made composite materials, at over 6000 years old.[1] Concrete is also a composite material, and is used more than any other man-made material in the world. As of 2006, about 7.5 billion cubic metres of concrete are made each year—more than one cubic metre for every person on Earth.[2]
Woody plants, both true wood from trees and such plants as palms and bamboo, yield natural composites that were used prehistorically by mankind and are still used widely in construction and scaffolding.
Plywood 3400 BC by the Ancient Mesopotamians; gluing wood at different angles gives better properties than natural wood
Cartonnage layers of linen or papyrus soaked in plaster dates to the First Intermediate Period of Egypt c. 2181–2055 BC and was used for death masks
Cob (material) Mud Bricks, or Mud Walls, (using mud (clay) with straw or gravel as a binder) have been used for thousands of years.
Concrete was described by Vitruvius, writing around 25 BC in his Ten Books on Architecture, distinguished types of aggregate appropriate for the preparation of lime mortars. For structural mortars, he recommended pozzolana, which were volcanic sands from the sandlike beds of Pozzuoli brownish-yellow-gray in colour near Naples and reddish-brown at Rome. Vitruvius specifies a ratio of 1 part lime to 3 parts pozzolana for cements used in buildings and a 1:2 ratio of lime to pulvis Puteolanus for underwater work, essentially the same ratio mixed today for concrete used at sea.[3] Natural cement-stones, after burning, produced cements used in concretes from post-Roman times into the 20th century, with some properties superior to manufactured Portland cement.
Papier-mâché, a composite of paper and glue, has been used for hundreds of years
The first artificial fibre reinforced plastic was bakelite which dates to 1907, although natural polymers such as shellac predate it