GEOLOGISTS have discovered a 3,000-year-old weapon carved out of ‘alien iron’ in Switzerland.
A member of the ancient Bronze Age is thought to have chipped away at a piece of meteorite to form it into an arrowhead.
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The artefact is made up of aluminium-26 – a short-lived isotope that is not naturally found on Earth but was abundant in the early years of our solar system.
The arrowhead around 1.5 inches long and weighs just 0.102 ounces.
“The style of the iron arrowhead strongly resembles that of bronze arrowheads from the same find complex, even though the fabrication process was very different,” the team wrote in the study.
“The attached carbon-rich organic material likely represents remnants of tar, probably wood (birch?) tar, indicating that it was fastened to an arrow at some point.”
The arrowhead was originally found at a Bronze Age site called Mörigen, in Lake of Biel, sometime during the 19th century.
However, it has been tucked away at Bern History Museum until recently, when it was rediscovered and tested.
The Mörigen arrowhead was previously thought to have come from a the Twannberg meteorite that crashed in Switzerland some 160,000 years ago.
But geologists now think it came from a meteorite in Estonia – on of three rocks on the planet with the exact same combination of metals – more than 1,400 miles from Switzerland.
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“The Mörigen arrowhead must be derived from a large (minimum 2 tons pre-atmospheric mass) IAB iron meteorite based on gamma spectrometry and elemental composition,” the study added.
“Among large IAB meteorites from Europe, three have a chemical composition consistent with the Mörigen arrowhead: Bohumilitz (Czech Republic), Retuerte de Bullaque (Spain) and Kaalijarv (Estonia).
“Kaalijarv is a large meteorite that produced a series of impact craters (the largest, called Kaalijärv, is 110 m [360 feet] in diameter, note different spelling for meteorite and crater) on the island of Saarema in Estonia.”
Instead of one part of the meteorite becoming dislodged and landing far from rest of its mass in Switzerland, geologists believe the weapon was traded over the Baltics.
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