A Little Bit Help from outer Space

Source: By Dbachmann, CC BY-SA 3.0,

IFLScience fragt: „How did Bronze Age civilizations manage to forge iron weapons before they had learned how to smelt iron ore?“ Die Antwort ist verblüffend: “ It turns out, they had a little bit of help from the cosmos, as many of the iron artifacts from this era appear to have an extraterrestrial origin.“ Der Original-Artikel „Bronze Age iron: Meteoritic or not? A chemical strategy.“

Hier das Resume:
• There has been a controversy about the origin of Bronze Age irons that could be either meteoritic or smelted irons.
• A geochemical approach using Fe:Co:Ni analyses, permits to differentiate terrestrial from extraterrestrial irons.
• Meteoritic irons, Bronze Age iron artifacts, ancient terrestrial irons and lateritic ores enable to validate this approach.
• Modern irons and iron ores are shown to exhibit a different relationship in a Fe:Co:Ni array.
• Iron from the Bronze Age are meteoritic, invalidating speculations about precocious smelting during the Bronze Age.