Did ancient people use meteorite iron?
Yes. Before people learned to smelt iron from ore, meteorites were the main source of iron metal, used for beads, blades and tools in ancient Egypt, Bronze Age Europe, the Arctic and elsewhere.
Iron meteorites are made mostly of iron alloyed with nickel, and they arrive as ready-made metal. For thousands of years before people learned to extract iron from ore by smelting, which became widespread only after about 1200 BCE, these "sky metals" were the only ready source of iron, and they were treasured.
The earliest known examples come from Egypt. Small tube-shaped beads found in graves at Gerzeh, dating to around 3200 BCE, were hammered from meteoritic iron, as scientists confirmed by measuring their nickel content and internal structure. The most famous object is the iron dagger buried with Tutankhamun in the 14th century BCE, shown by a 2016 study to have a meteoritic composition. Studies of other Bronze Age iron objects from the Middle East and the Mediterranean have found that many of them were made from meteorite iron too. In Switzerland, an arrowhead found at a Bronze Age lakeside settlement has been linked, from its chemistry, to the Kaali meteorites of Estonia, suggesting long-distance trade in sky iron.
In the Arctic, the Inughuit (Polar Inuit) of north-west Greenland used the huge Cape York iron meteorites for centuries, chipping off flakes and setting them into bone or ivory handles to make knives and harpoon tips. Their use of the "Iron Mountain" was known to European explorers. In North America, people of the Hopewell culture, around 2,000 years ago, hammered meteoritic iron into beads and ornaments.
How do scientists tell? Meteoritic iron usually contains several per cent nickel, along with cobalt, and often keeps traces of the meteorite's crystal structure. Iron smelted on Earth generally contains much less nickel. Analysing artefacts without damaging them, using methods such as X-ray fluorescence, has become a powerful way of reading this ancient story.