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3,000-year-old arrowhead found to be made from meteorite

09 August 2023 16:32 (UTC +04:00)

A Bronze Age arrowhead unearthed in Switzerland was made from a meteorite, a new study has found, APA reports citing CNN.

Dating back to between 900 and 800 BC, the 39-millimeter-long (1.5-inch-long) arrowhead was found on a pile-dwelling site in Mörigen on Lake Biel, Switzerland, during excavations in the 19th century, according to the study conducted by a team of researchers at the Natural History Museum of Bern.

The nearly 3,000-year-old artifact was created with iron from a meteorite that landed in Estonia, the study noted. This indicates that meteoritic iron was traded in Europe by 800 BC or earlier, the researchers said, adding how unusual it is to find meteoritic iron used so early in history.

“Such evidence of an early use of meteoritic iron is extremely rare,” according to a news release on the discovery.

At the time, humans had not yet started to smelt iron from oxide ores, but some metallic iron could be found in the impact fields of meteorites, according to the study.

While objects made using meteoritic iron have been found in Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Russia and China, such artifacts have previously only been discovered at two sites in central and western Europe, both in Poland.

Now, with the arrowhead finding, researchers have confirmed Mörigen as a third.