Iron beads found in a 5,000-year-old tomb have been thought, since their discovery at el-Gherzeh in Egypt in 1911, to be the earliest known iron artefacts.
But archaeologists have long been troubled by the fact that the beads came from a time two millennia before humans could make iron.
Now scientists from University College London have confirmed that the source of the jewellery was not an ancient Egyptian iron-smelting plant, but space: they were made from a meteor. They claim the skills that the Egyptians developed to turn meteoritic metal into necklaces were those which would much later kick-start the Iron Age.
Professor Thilo Rehren, director of the UCL branch in Qatar and an expert on the archaeology of metal working, analysed the beads using