A new study has revealed a bronze-age arrowhead dug up in Switzerland was made from a meteorite.
The arrowhead was unearthed at Bronze Age pile dwelling station near Mörigen in Switzerland during the 1800s and is believed to have been crafted between 900 and 800 BCE.
It was found only a few kilometres away from the Twannberg meteorite landing zone in Estonia, which led many to believe the ancient iron was from ancient space rock.
But a study from the Natural History Museum of Bren found the metal was not from the field they initially believed.
"With around 8.3% nickel, the content of this element in the arrowhead is almost twice as high as in the Twannberg meteorite," the study said.
It's now believed that it came from a meteorite that fell in Estonia much earlier, around 1500 BCE.
"The fall of this meteorite produced several craters up to 100 metres in diameter. Since the largest meteorite fragments exploded on the ground, many small fragments should have formed," the statement read.
While iron is commonly used today, civilisations at the time had no way of smelting the ore, which researchers at the Natural History Museum of Bren say made it "extremely rare". A lot of the time, iron was from meteorite shards.
"Archaeological objects made of meteoritic iron are therefore extremely rare, and they were probably not used as commodities at one time," the museum said.
Only 55 objects similar to the arrowhead have been found across Eurasia and Africa, coming from 22 different sites.
"19 objects alone come from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in Egypt. However, only part of the artefacts was examined using modern analytical methods."
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