I don't know where my wife got mine, but I'm also on Team Meteorite (inset into a titanium band -- CP titanium so I don't need to worry about it being cut off in an emergency).
Iron is iron. All the iron on earth is the remains of ancient stars. How is it different that it "came from a meteorite?" How could you even verify that? Or put another way, all iron came from meteorites, originally.
Why should it cost any more than a couple of nails from the hardware store?
The iron from meteorites has a very different chemical composition compared to iron extracted from terrestrial minerals.
More specifically, the iron meteorites are made of an alloy composed of iron, nickel, cobalt and germanium, with smaller quantities of other elements, like gallium, chromium and platinum-group elements. Besides these, there is a certain group of meteorites whose iron alloy also contains silicon (those come from bodies with too little oxygen, where not all the silicon was oxidized to form silicates).
The reason for why the meteorites have this composition, which must resemble the core of the Earth, is that these are the elements that remain uncombined with oxygen when there is not enough oxygen to oxidize everything, so only the elements with a greater affinity with oxygen are oxidized and form a mixture of silicate rocks, while the remainder dissolves in iron.
So this very unusual chemical composition is very easy to distinguish from terrestrial iron.
No. No luck here with any form of settings (I generally use uBlock origin in hard mode by default).
It always loads the 'Just a quick check -- We’re checking your connection to prevent automated abuse' page. Depending on my settings I may or may not load the actual Cloudflare checkbox.
And at that point I just don't want to bother with that site anymore really. Obviously I must be some 11th world country on some random sanctioned list (aka Germany). :-)
In ancient times with no light pollution they could probably see and track meteorites falling. And it could have been easier to access to get those metals than mining.
Perhaps sometimes they saw it hit and went to find it? But the night is long and people should be indoors asleep near the fire and meteorites fall all around the clock anyway?
So perhaps they mostly just picked weird rocks up off the ground, as the Inuit did? When you spend time outside with the herds you probably notice unusual wrongs.
The Inuit probably had a much easier time finding them, as they would stand out quite starkly among snow and ice.
Not exactly the same, but I’ve seen video of meteorite collecting on the Antarctic ice sheet near the South Pole and they just fan out in a big line and walk across the ice picking up meteorites.
They go completely dark at a very high altitude. I feel like a bright sunny day would give you a better chance of seeing a falling rock, at least once it gets closer to the ground
This doesn't really hold water. Iron weapons aren't really any better than Bronze, it's stiffer and lighter with an equivalent size blade but not any harder or sharper. Bronze can be cast in more complex shapes that can help with weapon effectiveness and even during the Iron Age bronze Weapons were used alongside iron ones. Iron is much more abundant so the revolution of the iron age was having much cheaper and accessible metal, not superior. It isn't until Steel that you really see bronze (and iron) become clearly inferior.
Actually, maybe we should. Get him distracted and focused on solving that using all of Palantir's might, and then he'll leave the rest of the world alone.
Iron smelting had not been invented yet. Meteorites were the only readily available source of iron. Upon the invention of smelting all iron rings appear to be smelted.
It is flat out Greek. I can even read some of the transliterations. I laughed like a drain when I saw that one of the leading characteristic key words of Aristotle's teaching, 'heneka' is the main connector in the oldest written Indo European text. three goats heneka one coat , i.e. 'for the sake of' in the context of a list of palace exchanges.
As for Linear A decipherment claims, claiming decipherment isn't the same as decipherment. For example, here's a claim from 2014 that Linear A encodes spoken Japanese: https://konosos.net/2014/12/09/the-phonetic-method-in-linear...Does Linear A encode spoken Japanese? of course not.
It's fair to argue they aren't. The Assyrian people still exist [1] today. The language and culture having been passed on-unbroken–by the living to the living for thousands of years.
The Myceneans–like the Hittites and others whom we know so little about we haven't named–are in a fundamentally distinct category. Like yes, they weren't nuked out of existence. But there is a permanent and irreparable break in the continuity of exchange that severs the timeline between then and now.
Mycenaeans are not remotely like the Hittites. The Mycenaean language is what turned into Greek, while Hittite died out and was forgotten. Myceneans were remembered and celebrated until the present day with the Odyssey and the Illiad (while I realise these were composed later, and are not a remotely perfect reflection of Mycenean society, they still refer to a memory of that time, and furthermore include authentic details from that time). The language and culture of the Mycenaeans also had an unbroken linguistic and cultural chain (of course with the big upheaval of the Bronze age collapse, but Assyrians also went through many upheavals).
Modern day Assyrians also speak Aramaic (or Arabic) rather than Akkadian which was the state language of the Assyrian empire (Aramaic did replace Akkadian as the lingua franca under the Neo-Assyrian empire however). Conversely, Greek is the descendant of Mycenaean Greek just as Coptic is the descendant of the Ancient Egyptian language.
Mycenaeans really are not like the Hittites who were essentially completely forgotten until 19th and 20th century archeology discovered them.
My engagement ring contains meteorite, supposedly from the Gibeon Meteorite, although the fact that a single meteorite is a component advertised in so many rings makes me somewhat suspicious as to the quantity or authenticity. But it looks pretty, anyway.
The "good enough" scenario I guessed at has a semi-honest treasure hunter finding a 100kg-ish fragment somewhere in those 10,000 sq. mi., then selling it to someone making rings. Lab work (isotope ratios, grain structure, etc.) could confirm that it was very likely part of the Gibeon meteorite - whether or not the ownership paperwork was legit.
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.
If I get lucky in IPO land I'll have my eye on a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch with a meteorite dial, so I guess things have not changed all that much in the last 3500 years :P
It should read Egyptian rings forged from meteorites were fashionable within the regional trading area in ancient times.
But : cultural misapropriation
A couple of years ago, this 3000 year old arrow head was found in Switzerland, it comes from a meteorite up in Estonia. I read about this news right when I was visiting the island of Saaremaa and the site. It's an amazing place and as the arrow shows, material like this got traded far even quite far back.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 4.9 ms ] threadWhy should it cost any more than a couple of nails from the hardware store?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widmanst%C3%A4tten_pattern
tbh its just a geeky coolness thing.
Actual metals are never 100% pure any one element. There are always alloys and impurities that speak to it's origins and history.
e.g. "The significant nickel concentration and consistent occurrence of cobalt confirm the meteoritic origin of the iron blades"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S12962...
More specifically, the iron meteorites are made of an alloy composed of iron, nickel, cobalt and germanium, with smaller quantities of other elements, like gallium, chromium and platinum-group elements. Besides these, there is a certain group of meteorites whose iron alloy also contains silicon (those come from bodies with too little oxygen, where not all the silicon was oxidized to form silicates).
The reason for why the meteorites have this composition, which must resemble the core of the Earth, is that these are the elements that remain uncombined with oxygen when there is not enough oxygen to oxidize everything, so only the elements with a greater affinity with oxygen are oxidized and form a mixture of silicate rocks, while the remainder dissolves in iron.
So this very unusual chemical composition is very easy to distinguish from terrestrial iron.
I would expect that to have gone up a decent chunk in the mean time given the price of gold has skyrocketed since then.
It always loads the 'Just a quick check -- We’re checking your connection to prevent automated abuse' page. Depending on my settings I may or may not load the actual Cloudflare checkbox.
And at that point I just don't want to bother with that site anymore really. Obviously I must be some 11th world country on some random sanctioned list (aka Germany). :-)
So perhaps they mostly just picked weird rocks up off the ground, as the Inuit did? When you spend time outside with the herds you probably notice unusual wrongs.
Not exactly the same, but I’ve seen video of meteorite collecting on the Antarctic ice sheet near the South Pole and they just fan out in a big line and walk across the ice picking up meteorites.
Nobody mention it to Peter Thiel, he doesn’t need any more ideas.
To Bronze Age Greeks, lacking the ability to smelt iron, an iron weapon would have been surpassingly strong, sharp and rare.
Later, during the Iron Age, Adamantine got retconned into something else (like diamond).
At the time, not so much. It was called "The Bronze Age" and "The Iron age" came later. The names aren't random.
From the article:
> The use of meteoritic iron particularly stands out during the Bronze Age because of the lack of iron smelting at the time.
In other words, the main source of this special metal was when the Gods occasionally threw down a piece, in a column of fire.
See also in ancient Egypt:
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2013/09/01/23856/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S12962...
Mycenaeans are considered Greek.
Minoans Generally not considered Greek
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03054...
Even the cave where Zeus was allegedly born is on Crete.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107
As for Linear A decipherment claims, claiming decipherment isn't the same as decipherment. For example, here's a claim from 2014 that Linear A encodes spoken Japanese: https://konosos.net/2014/12/09/the-phonetic-method-in-linear... Does Linear A encode spoken Japanese? of course not.
It's fair to argue they aren't. The Assyrian people still exist [1] today. The language and culture having been passed on-unbroken–by the living to the living for thousands of years.
The Myceneans–like the Hittites and others whom we know so little about we haven't named–are in a fundamentally distinct category. Like yes, they weren't nuked out of existence. But there is a permanent and irreparable break in the continuity of exchange that severs the timeline between then and now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrians
Modern day Assyrians also speak Aramaic (or Arabic) rather than Akkadian which was the state language of the Assyrian empire (Aramaic did replace Akkadian as the lingua franca under the Neo-Assyrian empire however). Conversely, Greek is the descendant of Mycenaean Greek just as Coptic is the descendant of the Ancient Egyptian language.
Mycenaeans really are not like the Hittites who were essentially completely forgotten until 19th and 20th century archeology discovered them.
It proves nothing - but from just 100kg, you could put 1/2 carat bits of meteorite in 1,000,000 rings.
The "good enough" scenario I guessed at has a semi-honest treasure hunter finding a 100kg-ish fragment somewhere in those 10,000 sq. mi., then selling it to someone making rings. Lab work (isotope ratios, grain structure, etc.) could confirm that it was very likely part of the Gibeon meteorite - whether or not the ownership paperwork was legit.
Something I saw while googling is that the composition & crystal structure of this meteorite makes it very attractive for use in jewellery.
When I first read the title, it sounded to me like a classic case of Kessler syndrome.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-3000-year-old...