A new study in the Journal of Archaeological Science seems to have solved a long-standing mystery that archeologists and scientists have faced: the discovery of iron artifacts that date back to the Bronze Age. The fact of iron in the Bronze Age record (3200 BCE—1200BCE) goes against the idea that humanity had yet to have the knowledge and capability to smelt iron. This meant that while many scientists and archeologists suggested an extraterrestrial solution—meteors—there were people who could still argue:
So far the limited testing that’s been done on Bronze Age iron has supported the meteorite theory. However, what has been hampering efforts to find out the exact makeup of more of these artifacts was the fear of destructive testing that would harm them. These scientists were able to find a way to non-destructively test the iron elements.
Albert Jambon, from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, studied museum artefacts from Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and China, analysing them using an X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer to discover they all shared the same off-world origins.
"The present results complementing high quality analyses from the literature suggest that most or all irons from the Bronze Age are derived from meteoritic iron," writes Jambon in his published paper.
Part of what differentiates iron that humans make and iron that comes from the sky is the level of nickel.
Key to answering that question is the fact that iron from meteorites falling to Earth contains a lot of nickel, whereas iron ore on the surface doesn't, because of the way nickel drifted towards the molten iron core of our planet during its formation.
The hope now is that using this technology, archeologists and scientists will be able to freely collect data without harm, and uncover another ambiguous timeline: when iron was actually first smelted by humans. Of course, there’s probably 33 percent of our population that will read something like this and say: