Talk about out-of-this-world bling! Spanish researchers have discovered that two iron artifacts from a hoard of precious treasure that dates back to the Late Bronze Age — before man started the widespread smelting of iron — contain iron from meteorites estimated to be around 1 million years old.
The researchers’ findings, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria last year, detail the chemical composition of what looks to be a portion of an iron bracelet or ring and half of a hollow iron sphere covered with fine gold filigree.
Scientists plucked the two artifacts from an around 3,000-year-old cache called the Villena Treasure, which Spanish historian and archaeologist José María Soler García uncovered just outside Villena, Spain back in 1963.
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The two iron pieces have always generated intrigue among researchers and consternation on their chronology because craftspeople made them at a time “before the production of terrestrial iron started,” the researchers state in the paper.
To finally put these questions to rest, researchers subjected the pieces to analysis via a spectrometer, first in Spain and then in Germany. Results strongly suggested the iron came from space.
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