Meteoric Iron Before the Iron Age

Meteoric iron is an iron-nickel alloy that arrives already formed, falling from the sky as part of an iron meteorite rather than being smelted from ore. Because it can be cold-worked and hammered into shape without the high furnace temperatures true iron smelting needs, Bronze Age peoples who had no way yet to produce terrestrial iron could still work this rarer, ready-made metal. Beads made from meteoric iron found at Gerzeh in Egypt date to roughly 3200 BCE, centuries before Egyptian iron smelting began, and their nickel content, far higher than any terrestrial ore produces naturally, is the marker that identifies them as meteoric rather than earthly in origin.

Modern metallurgical analysis of pre-Iron-Age iron artifacts uses that same nickel signature to trace meteoric origin, and it has confirmed the sky origin of iron objects across widely separated cultures, from Arctic tools made from fragments of the Cape York meteorite to a dagger blade found among Tutankhamun's grave goods. In each case the metal predates any local capacity to smelt iron from ore, which is the clearest evidence that it fell rather than was mined.