4 ms·

I wonder how many meteorites were laying around in the early days of humans caring about metal.

• jayGlow 2mo ago
  apparently several thousand small meteors strike earth per year. eventually they'd get buried but there would likely be a pretty huge number of them lying around after a few million years.
• applicative 2mo ago
  There are some places, like Cape York, where the meteorite was immense so fragments are in a long line and cold forging gets developed. That is, you keep bumping into bits in the same area so you start to think. Sometimes people are interested in the recurrent fragments but do not forge, as Canyon Diablo, which I think is tough to handle anyway. They know the bits are from the stars, which is quite enough to delight. In Egypt there seems anciently to have been an activity of hunting for where 'iron from the sky' landed, before there was hot forging. I don't know if there is a case of a spectacular strewn zone there, but the phenomenon had been taken on board, and continued much later. I dimly remember first reading about it when a bedoin's camel was found somehow outfitted with something beaten from a meteorite.