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Almost All Bronze Age Artifacts Were Made From Meteorite Iron (sciencealert.com)
dryriver shares a report from Science Alert: According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites. The finding has given experts a better insight into how these tools were created before humans worked out how to produce iron from its ore. While previous studies had found specific Bronze Age objects to be made from meteoric metal -- like one of the daggers buried with King Tutankhamun -- this latest research answers the question of just how widespread the practice was. Albert Jambon, from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, studied museum artifacts from Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and China, analyzing them using an X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer to discover they all shared the same off-world origins. "The present results complementing high quality analyses from the literature suggest that most or all irons from the Bronze Age are derived from meteoritic iron," writes Jambon in his published paper. "The next step will be to determine where and when terrestrial iron smelting appeared for the first time."
Iron ore requires smelting at very high temperatures to extract the iron. Meteoric iron is in its metallic form already.
People discovered how to work metal by finding "native" forms. Hunks of pure or nearly pure copper, silver and gold. Iron doesn't form these, you need to know how to smelt it. By the bronze age, they had learned to smelt copper and tin, but iron requires higher and more consistent heat than they had the ability to make. But, if you find native iron in the form of meteorites, you can skip that process and create tools.
You are very confused and not understanding the issue at all. Meteoric iron is elemental iron, already smelted as it were. Mined iron is ore, terrestrial deposits of oxidized iron, not from meteors that worked their way into the eartch.
This ore needs to be mined, then heated very hot (relative to making bronze) to extract the elemental iron from the ore to a usable elemental metal. So this finding explains how humans could have a limited quantity of iron weapons/tools before the discovery/invention of mining and smelting iron ore. The latter is what gave us the Iron Age.
Two very different processes, two very different technologies. Yes, it all ultimately came from the same place. So did every f-ing thing. Why do we bother to talk about anything?
Jesus, have you never seen a falling meteor? The intense heat would have smelted the iron and nickel, iron isn't on Earth and oxidizes
The intense heat does melt the surface of the meteor, in fact in vaporizes some of it (which you see, in part, in the meteor trail).
But if you have seen a falling meteor you will have notice that this fiery part of the descent lasts just a few seconds at most. And then ordinary air cooling as it falls quickly cools the surface down to ambient. The intense heat does not have time to penetrate very far, so most of the meteor is extremely cold when it lands on Earth.
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