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."

Comments

Captain Obvious? Or Captain Iron-ic?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites.

You don't say! "Before we could make X on our own, we used whatever X was lying around"?

Misleading title

[jfdavis668]

All artifacts are made from meteorite iron? Does that include clay pots? The write up is accurate, do a better job with the title.

Re:Why is any of this notable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two very different processes, two very different technologies.

And two different energy budgets. That's the history of mankind: progress correlates with an ever increasing amount of available energy

And it's going on to the day.