Almost All Bronze Age Artifacts Were Made From Meteorite Iron (sciencealert.com) 132
dryriver shares a report from Science Alert: According to a new study, it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites. The finding has given experts a better insight into how these tools were created before humans worked out how to produce iron from its ore. While previous studies had found specific Bronze Age objects to be made from meteoric metal -- like one of the daggers buried with King Tutankhamun -- this latest research answers the question of just how widespread the practice was. Albert Jambon, from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, studied museum artifacts from Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and China, analyzing them using an X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer to discover they all shared the same off-world origins. "The present results complementing high quality analyses from the literature suggest that most or all irons from the Bronze Age are derived from meteoritic iron," writes Jambon in his published paper. "The next step will be to determine where and when terrestrial iron smelting appeared for the first time."
What's the difference? (Score:2)
Re:What's the difference? (Score:5, Informative)
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No nickel either.
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Actually no, temp is not a problem, if that was all it took, then more vigorous work at bellows would do the job. The technique of getting workable iron from ore using primitive methods is just different than with say copper or tin. You can't just smelt and pour an ingot. If you melt the iron at any point then it saturates with readily available carbon and produces useless material, the trick is to reduce the iron without melting it, for that you need to keep the temperature steady and limited. From that yo
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Not exactly. If you smelt iron from ore or from iron-rich soil, the iron is what is left behind in the oven. In other words: you melt the ore from the iron. The iron you have left in the oven is very porous and brittle, and contains a huge amount of carbon (making it extra brittle). It therefore takes quite some work to convert this iron into any workable steel or iron.
Not exactly. The iron never melted in an Iron Age smelter. It forms a loose porous mass of reduced metal saturated with slag called a "bloom". This is taken out and hammered to from "wrought iron", which can then be shaped and perhaps carbonized in the a forge to make a harder surface.
Techniques to use melted iron - either directly as cast iron, or else by reducing it to eliminate the excess carbon - were developed much later. But it was easier to make smelters not quite hot enough to melt the iron anyway.
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Because of the nickel inclusions that are common, iron meteorites are more or less ready-to-go lumps of low grade stainless steel. The ancients could simply smash a piece off and then beat it into shape, no chemistry necesssary.
Re:What's the difference? (Score:5, Informative)
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People discovered how to work metal by finding "native" forms. Hunks of pure or nearly pure copper, silver and gold. Iron doesn't form these...
Or rather, it is quite rare that it does. This is called telluric iron [wikipedia.org]. The only major deposit of this is in Greenland (and was used by the Inuit) but small deposits might exist elsewhere. Examining the artifacts would be needed to confirm that this was not from some unknown telluric iron source.
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Oki, I give me few cents to that thread:
Iron unlike copper etc. is not simply 'melted' out of ore.
Iron only exists in various forms of iron oxices, which need to be 'reduced', you need heat and something that takes the oxide out of the iron ore (and in that process the iron is melted)
For that you use cornon monoxide, aka burning charr coal ember, and obviously you need a hot fire.
So the main diffence to copper smelting is not the heat alone but the amount of carbon monoxide you can produce in the fire,
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Purity, and chemical form. Iron ore is oxidized iron, and requires skill and energy to extract the pure metal. Meteoric iron is already the metallic form (usually mixed with nickel). Many museums have a meteorite sawn in half - you can see it's shiny solid metal inside, not a lump of rock. But not all meteorites are iron - some are actually rocky.
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This is a more informative answer, thanks. So is it that Earth's iron has been exposed to too much oxygen over the billions of years and oxidized, but meteoric iron has not? I'm just trying to understand the why...
Yes. Meteoric iron rusts away just like regular iron and turns to a lump of reddish iron oxide. Lots of historic meteor fall sites are full of red lumps of oxidized meteors. To make a useful tool you must recover a meteorite before this happens. A large chunk of meteor metal though could take a long time to completely oxidize, and if recovered from the desert (this is the Middle East) it could survive without rusting completely for thousands of years.
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Most of the "Middle East" isn't desert now, and wasn't during the "Bronze Age". Just to confuse your mistaken perceptions, the area that you're probably considering "Middle East" is also closely coincident with what the historians and archaeologists consider as the "Fertile Crescent".
Re: What's the difference? (Score:1)
Re: What's the difference? (Score:4, Informative)
Jesus, have you never seen a falling meteor? The intense heat would have smelted the iron and nickel, iron isn't on Earth and oxidizes
The intense heat does melt the surface of the meteor, in fact in vaporizes some of it (which you see, in part, in the meteor trail).
But if you have seen a falling meteor you will have notice that this fiery part of the descent lasts just a few seconds at most. And then ordinary air cooling as it falls quickly cools the surface down to ambient. The intense heat does not have time to penetrate very far, so most of the meteor is extremely cold when it lands on Earth.
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90 to 95% of meteorites are "stony", not "iron". However, without fairly sophisticated petrology (art/ science of describing rocks) such as cutting thin- or polished- sections of the specimen, identification of "weird stone sample WS1234" as a meteorite was a lot harder than identifying an iron-nickel meteorite as a particular class of "weird".
to this day (well, about 2000), it has been routine for geology exams to include a "stony" meteorite in the
Captain Obvious? Or Captain Iron-ic? (Score:2, Insightful)
it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites.
You don't say! "Before we could make X on our own, we used whatever X was lying around"?
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You don't say! "Before we could make X on our own, we used whatever X was lying around"?
I'd love to see someone demonstrate that they can create "Fe". Think carefully before you respond.
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As someone else pointed out above the iron in meteorites is metallic. If you didn't have that you'd have to smelt iron ore. Which required higher temperatures than bronze.
Though oddly enough once you can smelt iron it's easier to get iron ore than it is to get copper and tin or arsenic which you need for bronze.
So once you can smelt iron it's actually easier to get hold of the ore so you can make weapons in volume. And iron plus carbon gives you steel which is harder than bronze.
I.e. if you're a militaristi
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Re:Captain Obvious? Or Captain Iron-ic? (Score:5, Funny)
You can't make a knife out of "Fe"
Sure you can, just put "Kni" in front of it.
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You can if you mix it with other stuff. How about we call it "cofefe".
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In the old times, before chemistry, making metals pure enough to be more useful then just a colored rock was a skill.
How would we know that we could probably get a strong metal out of an orange rock. The ore rarely shows properties of the refined product. So when people found more pure iron from meteorite and find their properties useful, and the fact they will rust over time, and show properties of the ore, for someone to try to make better.
No they are not doing atomic fusion to make iron atoms, but the
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I'd love to see someone demonstrate that they can create "Fe". Think carefully before you respond.
But we can! It's just still extremely expensive, but can be done. And once we'll learn how to milk fusion and fission to the last bit of energy, it's pure Fe that we'll have in excess.
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Well, it sounds like kicking in an open door, but there could have been two scenarios:
Glass was probably invented the first way. If you want to make iron, you will heat a clay oven so hot that sand in the clay turns to glass. Glass droplets were found in old finding sites, sugges
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it's possible that all iron-based weapons and tools of the Bronze Age were forged using metal salvaged from meteorites.
You don't say! "Before we could make X on our own, we used whatever X was lying around"?
The entire point of the article is that evidence is showing that the time when we could make our own is now moved from what history had previously assumed to a much later date.
Misleading title (Score:4, Insightful)
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Agreed, that's how I interpreted it. However, headlines are almost always lossy or ambiguous out of necessity. The details go into the body text: that's what body text is for. However, I invite the complainer to offer an alternative headline.
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Whoever smelt it, dealt it. (Score:1)
That is all.
I feel like we're missing the obvious! (Score:2)
You say they were made from "meteorites" but all we really know is that the metal didn't come from earth. [onsizzle.com] ;)
Re:I feel like we're missing the obvious! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not saying it's Aliens... But....
It's Aliens.
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No wonder the earth branch of Watto's Junk Shop Emporium went broke, seeing how little he seems to have sold. It was even a bigger loss than all the guys trying to stick him with worthless Republican Credits.
So what? (Score:2)
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In the Bronze Age - the period before we had discovered how to smelt iron...
The Bronze Age is the period where nearly all metal tools were made of bronze -- which is the primary observable fact.
Claiming that this was entirely a "period before we had discovered how to smelt iron" is a conclusion that must be derived from actual data, not simply asserted.
There were iron artifacts being made during the Bronze Age. It could have been the case that iron smelting existed and was conducted on a small scale, but simply had not supplanted bronze. Without examining the actual evidence we wou
Not meteorites (Score:5, Funny)
Just saying.
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Good god. Life is a simulation! You can tell because the graphics are getting better.
Star iron! (Score:1)
Like, *everyone* had a +4 axe made from star iron! Thats a whole lot of loot. How did anyone manage to make their saving throws?
Well, yeah (Score:2)
Because when people figured out how to smelt iron, that was the Iron Age.
Artefacts (Score:2)
Bronze made with iron (Score:2)
This is really news!
Old news ... (Score:2)
That is well known since 50 years or more, but nice that a 'new study' confirms it again.
Re:Why is any of this notable? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the point being made is not where iron comes from. The interesting thing is that humans had iron tools and weapons in the Bronze Age before we knew how to get it out of the ground. Apparently, it wasn't really clear how that happened. The Bronze Age is so named because we knew how to cast bronze, the Iron Age came after. So where did we get the iron? Meteorites.
Pretty cool.
Re:Why is any of this notable? (Score:5, Informative)
You are very confused and not understanding the issue at all. Meteoric iron is elemental iron, already smelted as it were. Mined iron is ore, terrestrial deposits of oxidized iron, not from meteors that worked their way into the eartch.
This ore needs to be mined, then heated very hot (relative to making bronze) to extract the elemental iron from the ore to a usable elemental metal. So this finding explains how humans could have a limited quantity of iron weapons/tools before the discovery/invention of mining and smelting iron ore. The latter is what gave us the Iron Age.
Two very different processes, two very different technologies. Yes, it all ultimately came from the same place. So did every f-ing thing. Why do we bother to talk about anything?
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Two very different processes, two very different technologies.
And two different energy budgets. That's the history of mankind: progress correlates with an ever increasing amount of available energy
And it's going on to the day.
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And two different energy budgets
Budgets are human concepts that are irrelevant to nature
That's the history of mankind: progress correlates with an ever increasing amount of available energy
And it's going on to the day.
Heard of the Law of Conservation of Energy? Without a basic knowledge of science it's hard to engage in a scientific discussion.
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On the contrary, budgets are very relevant to nature. All life has to maintain a nitrogen budget, for example. And while humans have had a severe effect on the carbon budget in the atmosphere, it existed long before humans did.
Yes, I've heard of it. It isn't relevant. The Earth is not a closed system (as it is constantly r
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On the contrary, budgets are very relevant to nature. All life has to maintain a nitrogen budget, for example. And while humans have had a severe effect on the carbon budget in the atmosphere, it existed long before humans did.
We have a null hypothesis here. Some living creatures regulate nitrogen usage. You are claiming that there is a connection between that natural process and the anthropmorphic concept of a "budget" yet you haven't demonstrated any evidence to establish the connection. Surely you are familiar with the Null Hypothesis correct? It would be more correct to say that these are natural processes that aren't really all the orderly compared the order that human beings strive for and imagine in their minds.
This is
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Holy crap you're conceited. In other words, you've seen Cosmos therefore you have a "science education", and it's not worth wasting your time on people that lack a "science education".
Get over yourself.
You're obsessed with anthropomorphism and spending more time explaining that than realizing that the GP is right. "Budgets" can be observed naturally, such as in conservation of energy (which you refer to). Any conservation law naturally reflects a constraint on availability of a physical property (mass, e
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I might note that while the universe is generally believed to be a closed system and most theories in use today work from that assumption, it has not been proved to be so, and some theories have been advanced on the assumption that it is not so.
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Talking about the advancement of civilization and available energy "in the context of the universe" is not the correct context. The advancement of civilization takes place in the context of various small regions of the planet Earth; that is the appropriate context to discuss it in.
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You're making a bullshit semantic argument.
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Budgets are human concepts that are irrelevant to nature
Heard of the Law of Conservation of Energy?
Am I the only one that sees the contradiction here?
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And increasing technology. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, for a post-apocalypse society to work its way back up to our current level of technology, or even to sustain any level higher than the Stone Age, because the remaining resources for the Iron Age or the Bronze Age are no longer extractable with those levels of technology. All the easy to mine sources have already been exhausted.
That includes energy. Restarting the Machine Age would be challenging because we've already gotten to all the
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Yes, it all ultimately came from the same place. So did every f-ing thing. Why do we bother to talk about anything?
Because humans like to talk about how awesome they are and celebrate themselves. On occasion we even make statues of ourselves to admire. ;)
Re:Why is any of this notable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bronze is a harder metal than pure iron. That means that it keeps a better edge and is less likely to bend. (Both written and archaeological shows that iron swords bending in battle was an actual problem - one of the Roman historians even wrote about how their enemies had to stop mid-battle and straighten their swords!)
The thinking is that the bronze age didn't end because iron was better for weapons, but the bronze age ended because tin and copper were relatively rare compared to iron and frequently needed to be traded long distance. When the bronze age saw the collapse of its trading networks, people turned to local resources, which meant iron.
It was only much later, when we developed better metallurgy, that we could consistently make iron alloys that were better than bronze.
So were these iron weapons more ceremonial? Prized because they are rare? Or indicative of regional trade issues?
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Bronze is a harder metal than pure iron. That means that it keeps a better edge and is less likely to bend.
Both the first and the second sentence is wrong.
First of all, bronze is a lot of different things, but the Rockwell hardness scale scores of various bronze alloys available at the time are in the 40-65 range. That's certainly much harder than copper, which is at 10 on the same scale, but cast iron is at 86. I.e. much higher than bronze. Even modern bronzes, like aluminium and silicon bronze, are less hard than cast iron, although they come closer.
As for keeping an edge, that is related to factors that's
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My source, among others, was Mark Miodownik. Wikipedia also claims that bronze was harder than iron, and ci
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Cold worked bronze is really harder at a reasonable tin content than pure annealed iron. Cast iron is hard because it has a high carbon content, that is not generally available in the bronze age, or in meteors...It is also useless for swords as it is would break as soon as you try to use it
But I agree that it is pretty complicated, and a lot depends on how the metal is worked.
There are bronze swords with a VPH (I find rockwell a mess when comparing metals) reported above 200. That is as good as some steels.
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Bronce is not harder, it is softer, both than iron and steel.
However it is not as brittle as 'bad' iron/steel.
Bottom line it is not a question of rarity but industry. The indusrty slowly shifted to iron. And a workshop that was producing iron, probably could not afford to habe a second branch for iron.
It might also be a matter of style, who wants an old school bronce knive when he can have a nice glittering steel knive?
Both technologies existed at the same time, e.g. spartan spears had an iron/steal tip. Bu
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The thinking is that the bronze age didn't end because iron was better for weapons, but the bronze age ended because tin and copper were relatively rare compared to iron and frequently needed to be traded long distance. When the bronze age saw the collapse of its trading networks, people turned to local resources, which meant iron.
There's some disagreement over this: the collapse of the trading networks could have been caused by increased use of iron weapons causing the collapse of the bronze age civilizations.
Historian Robert Drews discusses this in his book The End of the Bronze Age.
It's not that the iron weapons were necessarily much better at that point. Bronze worker Neil Burridge discusses this on his web site:
"In recent television programme for the BBC, one of my bronze swords was repeatedly stuck against a reproduction of an
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So were these iron weapons more ceremonial? Prized because they are rare? Or indicative of regional trade issues?
If they were meteorite iron I'd have to assume they were extremely rare.
Rich people back then would have been a lot like the rich people of today. When you have a bit of money you get the same thing everyone else has, only better. When you have an absurd amount of money you start looking for other ways to show off your wealth, a weapon made from a rock that fell from the friggin' sky is really damn cool.
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I would expect this would be also cause the root myths behind many religions are lore.
Tell me if this story sounds familiar.
Nobody peasant or at best low level nobility, wandering the wilderness, then out of the sky came the indestructible weapon, or from a magical rock a wonderful weapon is found.
Compared to bronze a weapon made from Iron would seem nearly magical, combine that they had found it from a rock that had flew from the sky.
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I would expect this would be also cause the root myths behind many religions are lore.
Tell me if this story sounds familiar.
Nobody peasant or at best low level nobility, wandering the wilderness, then out of the sky came the indestructible weapon, or from a magical rock a wonderful weapon is found.
Compared to bronze a weapon made from Iron would seem nearly magical, combine that they had found it from a rock that had flew from the sky.
Depends on the iron. The earliest iron age weapon were inferior to bronze weapons, but were just much much cheaper as iron is significantly more abundant. Not until practices were establish to get some accidental consistency in carbon levels did the quality improve, but when the carbon levels are consistent in iron tools we tend to call it steel (though all ancient iron tools and weapons are "technically" steel of varying quality).
Re:Why is any of this notable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Depends on the iron. The earliest iron age weapon were inferior to bronze weapons, but were just much much cheaper as iron is significantly more abundant.
But meteoritic iron isn't exactly pig iron. It's mostly quite strong nickel alloys, stronger than iron or unhardened steel. Combined with its extreme rarity it would be the stuff of legends.
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Possibly, but my guess is that most of the time they didn't actually see the meteor fall or know it came from space. They just found metal "rocks" on the ground that looked a certain way and they knew they could make tools and weapons out of them.
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Bzzzt! Thank you for playing.
Arthur was somewhere between the late-400 CE to early 500CE. That's about two thousand years after the end of the Bronze Age.
And before you try to argue that, *every* story and legend has him *after* the Roman Legions left Britain.
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Aha, "He pulled a sword from the stone."
Now it makes sense.
Like quickly pulling something out of your hat:
He pulled a "rapid" out of his hat!
What a great magician!
No! the point is ALIENS. (Score:3)
The point of the article is that human evolution is really just one big alien experiment. In this case aliens were dropping chunks of metal on us, so we can use it to evolve our societies.
Though maybe I'm reading too much into the article.
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Get a haircut, weirdo!
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Indeed - summary is a bit light on critical thinking (I didn't RTFA, maybe that's better?). The important take-away here is: (Bronze age) Mankind a bit cleverer than we thought it was. It also highlights how far the knowledge of how to do this spread, and to some extent at what speed.
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The important take-away here is: (Bronze age) Mankind a bit cleverer than we thought it was
Oh we already knew how clever Bronze Age man was. They invented very sophisticated superstition to brain-wash and enslave massive groups of people. Making Bronze Age weapons from iron ore meteorites is nothing... well I suppose it helped them fight tribal wars based on said superstition.
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If you buy into any of the bicameral mind concept, it wasn't even much of an idea to form religions. They just didn't know any better because their assumed their voice of consciousness was a religious deity.
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If you buy into any of the bicameral mind concept, it wasn't even much of an idea to form religions. They just didn't know any better because their assumed their voice of consciousness was a religious deity.
For people like me that have a fairly high degree of mental discipline with regard to regulating thoughts and emotions to direct them purposefully, it is hard for me to imagine people who may have thought like that or possibly still do. But I can see that may have played a factor and might explain some human behavior we still observe today. I can make any voice speak in my head in any way I decide. I could have Bugs Bunny read Shakespeare or I can have silence and it requires a negligible amount of effor
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It seems hard to believe now, but I find it kind of compelling because in the absence of any compelling evidence/information/communication to the contrary it seems like the "voice in your head" could possibly be thought of as a separate entity or at least something different than your animal impulses.
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It seems hard to believe now, but I find it kind of compelling because in the absence of any compelling evidence/information/communication to the contrary it seems like the "voice in your head" could possibly be thought of as a separate entity or at least something different than your animal impulses.
I'd go with animal impulses but in my case, I don't have any spontaneous/autonomous voices. I can purposefully do "think talk" to work through a thought process. Everyone can do that and control what the thoughts are. Those who have a voice occur spontaneously and can't control it have symptoms of schizophrenia.
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Oh my, well thank you for blessing us lowly plebes on /. with a description of your amazing mental capabilities. ...
Thank you for such a wonderful contribution to the discussion
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Being clever or not has not much to do with 'technology level'. ... I would call that 'not clever', most people I know can not skin an animal or cut the meat from the bones, or sail a boat ar build a shelter ... sounds all very unclever to me. ... not sure how clever that is.
Most people I ever met don't know why a circle has 360 degrees
But they all handle a smart phone and can even operate difficult to handle micro waves
Magic Items (Score:2)
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It would likely be seen as a gift from the gods, if they saw it fall and tracked it down.. That would be the stuff of legend.
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If they knew it fell from space, then it would literally be other worldly to them.
They wouldn't. You find meteorites on the ground long after they fall. Observed falls with recovery are extremely rare, even on a much more densely inhabited Earth, and of metallic meteors (which are only about 0.1% of all falls) almost unknown.
No one on Earth knew of the extra-terrestrial origin of meteors until the Eighteenth Century.
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... which are only about 0.1% of all falls...
Typo. That should be 0.4% of all falls.
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And as has been poin
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So where did we get the iron? Meteorites.
Pretty cool.
Yes, pretty cool, but we've known about meteorite iron for quite some time. Long enough for it to be a thing in D&D. I think there are even some large meteors around that were still being "mined" for iron until fairly recently when they were instead protected. I think the take away with this study is that ALL bronze age iron came from meteorites. Previously, it seems that it was thought that iron smelting was known in the bronze age but not really used until it absolutely had to be due to disrupted trad
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No. Sidros means "iron" in Greek (and the name of an island), sideris means "star" in Latin. They are independently derived from Proto Indoeuropean (PIE) *sweid which means "to shine". Shiny metal, shiny star. That is the relationship.