Iron-age tools, is there a way to extract heavy metals out of a creature?

Assume a location which is heavily polluted with dust of several types of elemental metals (copper, silver, nickel, cobalt etc) or their respective oxides and salts (whatever is stable in humidity and air). It's in the water, in the dirt, basically everywhere. All organisms consume it with their food all along the food chain.

There is an apex predator on top of the food chain, which is resistant to metal poisoning and gets enriched heavily with those elements over the course of its lifespan. Of its 150kg body mass, about 1,5kg to 2kg are metals.

Everything above is for context. Now to my question:

Assume savvy iron-age hunters trapping and killing the beast. They know of the metal-content of the corpse and want to scavenge it.

Given Iron Age tools (including fire, basic smelter etc.), is there a way for our brave foragers to extract the metal out of the body of the dead predator?

The body itself is not the main obstacle, because it consists of pretty standard mammalian mix of hide, muscle, flesh, organs and so on. I thought about fire, but all those metals have different melting points, right?

posted over 4 years ago

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