Researchers have discovered than an ancient Egyptian bead was made out of iron taken from a meteorite. In a paper published in Meteoritics & Planetary Science, they write that the piece of jewelry dates back to roughly 3,300 BC. It was one of nine such artifacts found in 1911 — at a cemetery roughly 70 kilometers south of Cairo — and its origin has been a point of contention for some time. Its very existence seemed to contradict the known record of iron smelting in the region, which hasn’t been seen until thousands of years later during the sixth century BC. A meteorite would have made sense as an alternate origin — and analysis in 1928 revealed that the iron in the beads had a high amount of nickel, a finding consistent with material from a meteorite.
via The Verge
