Egyptian beads may have been made from meteorites

Nature : Analysis of tube-shaped beads excavated from an ancient Egyptian cemetery has revealed the presence of iron with a high nickel content, which indicates the metal may have come from a meteorite. In their study published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, Diane Johnson of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and colleagues describe how they used scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to study one of the beads. Not only did they find that the bead predates the development of iron smelting in the area, but they also observed that the metal displayed the distinctive crystalline structure known as a Widmanstätten pattern, found only in iron meteorites. The few iron artifacts that have been discovered have all come from the graves of important people, such as the pharaoh Tutankhamun, which suggests that the Egyptians recognized the celestial origin of the material.