5,000 years old Egyptian iron beads made from hammered meteoritic iron

5,000 Years Old Egyptian Iron Beads Made From Hammered Meteoritic Iron, by Thilo Rehren and a fourteen-member multidisciplinary team of coauthors, in the peer reviewed Journal of Archaeological Science in 2013, reports non-destructive neutron and X-ray analysis of nine tube beads excavated in 1911 from a Predynastic cemetery at Gerzeh in northern Egypt. The beads, dated to roughly 3200 BCE, were shown to have been shaped by careful hammering rather than casting, and their unusually high nickel content confirmed a meteoritic rather than a smelted origin, making them the earliest known worked iron objects anywhere. Its authority rests on standard peer review, a large multidisciplinary author team spanning archaeology, materials science and archaeometry, and direct non-destructive testing of the original beads rather than argument from analogy or later legend. Its limit is that it concerns nine beads from one find and does not itself address other, later meteoric iron objects such as Tutankhamun's dagger, which separate studies have examined on their own terms.