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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."
I think the point being made is not where iron comes from. The interesting thing is that humans had iron tools and weapons in the Bronze Age before we knew how to get it out of the ground. Apparently, it wasn't really clear how that happened. The Bronze Age is so named because we knew how to cast bronze, the Iron Age came after. So where did we get the iron? Meteorites.
Pretty cool.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Depends on the iron. The earliest iron age weapon were inferior to bronze weapons, but were just much much cheaper as iron is significantly more abundant.
But meteoritic iron isn't exactly pig iron. It's mostly quite strong nickel alloys, stronger than iron or unhardened steel. Combined with its extreme rarity it would be the stuff of legends.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Actually no, temp is not a problem, if that was all it took, then more vigorous work at bellows would do the job. The technique of getting workable iron from ore using primitive methods is just different than with say copper or tin. You can't just smelt and pour an ingot. If you melt the iron at any point then it saturates with readily available carbon and produces useless material, the trick is to reduce the iron without melting it, for that you need to keep the temperature steady and limited. From that you get a seemingly useless iron sponge that is riddled with slag, that slag needs to be worked out of the material until you get an actual solid piece of metal. In comparison copper is much simpler, you just fire the ore with enough heat and it reduces, melts and collects into solid pieces, could happen accidentally in a campfire even.
Bronze is a harder metal than pure iron. That means that it keeps a better edge and is less likely to bend. (Both written and archaeological shows that iron swords bending in battle was an actual problem - one of the Roman historians even wrote about how their enemies had to stop mid-battle and straighten their swords!)
The thinking is that the bronze age didn't end because iron was better for weapons, but the bronze age ended because tin and copper were relatively rare compared to iron and frequently needed to be traded long distance. When the bronze age saw the collapse of its trading networks, people turned to local resources, which meant iron.
It was only much later, when we developed better metallurgy, that we could consistently make iron alloys that were better than bronze.
So were these iron weapons more ceremonial? Prized because they are rare? Or indicative of regional trade issues?
On the contrary, budgets are very relevant to nature. All life has to maintain a nitrogen budget, for example. And while humans have had a severe effect on the carbon budget in the atmosphere, it existed long before humans did.
Yes, I've heard of it. It isn't relevant. The Earth is not a closed system (as it is constantly receiving massive amounts of energy from the Sun) .And as the OP said, "increasing amount of available energy". There is no Law of Conservation of Available Energy, particularly in a system that is not closed.