What is the oldest recorded meteorite fall?
The oldest witnessed fall with a surviving specimen is generally accepted to be the Nōgata meteorite, which fell in Japan on 19 May 861 CE and is still kept at a Shinto shrine; older written records of falls exist, but without preserved stones.
The answer depends on what counts as a record. People have written about stones falling from the sky for thousands of years. Ancient Chinese chronicles, Greek and Roman writers, and other cultures describe such events, sometimes in vivid detail. The difficulty is that, in most cases, no stone survives, so we cannot be sure exactly what happened.
When scientists speak of the oldest recorded fall, they usually mean the oldest witnessed fall whose meteorite still exists. That title is generally given to Nōgata, a stone of 472 g that fell in what is now Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan on 19 May 861 CE. According to the shrine's tradition, it fell with a bright flash and a loud bang, and was kept in a wooden box at a Shinto shrine in the town of Nōgata, where it has been cherished for more than a thousand years. In 1979, after careful analysis by Japanese scientists, it was confirmed as a genuine meteorite, an L6 ordinary chondrite, a common type of stony meteorite.
In Europe, the oldest preserved witnessed fall is the famous Ensisheim meteorite, which crashed into a wheat field in Alsace in November 1492. Much of it can still be seen in the town today.
Meteoritic iron was used even earlier, though not from witnessed falls. Beads made from meteoritic iron, found in a grave at Gerzeh in Egypt, are more than 5,000 years old, and Tutankhamun was buried with a meteoritic iron dagger around 3,300 years ago. These show that ancient people valued metal from the sky, even if nobody recorded where or when it arrived. Nōgata reminds us how precious a carefully kept specimen can be: it links a moment in medieval Japan with the history of the Solar System.