Uses:
Like other metals, gold can be processed in an Acid Bath to create salts of gold.
One skill known to our Tale 1 ancestors, but lost to us today, was the knowledge of how to pan for gold. Small chunks of gold, 1 deben in size, could periodically be spotted when traveling near water, and collected by individuals with a heavy lead bowl and a Perception of 7 or greater. The process of finding gold was very similar to that of finding slate -- except, of course, that gold was much rarer and harder to spot than slate.
Gold panning was a useful skill which enabled our ancestors to obtain gold to unlock technologies that required it (such as Basic Chemistry) even before the first gold mine had been found.