We have iron artifacts which are thousands of years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age says "The earliest-known

We have iron artifacts which are thousands of years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age says "The earliest-known meteoric iron artifacts are nine small beads dated to 3200 BC, which were found in burials at Gerzeh, Lower Egypt, having been shaped by careful hammering." That's 5,000 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaca_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaca_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk shows "Dagger with iron blade and golden hilt from Alaca Höyük. Early evidence for the use of iron in Anatolia. 2500-2400 BC." You can see the iron is heavily rusted, but clearly present over 4,000 years later." https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-019-09129-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-019-09129-6 says "Larger numbers of iron artifacts, too many to list individually, appeared in the second millennium BC. Waldbaum (1978, 1980, 1999) produced several early syntheses of available references to iron in the Bronze Age Mediterranean and parts of the Near East, totaling about 150 artifacts. The majority of these come from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1200 BC)." These are over 3,000 year old. Even if iron could not be found, where are the furnaces, tuyeres, and slag which are part of iron production?