Another take on this technology.
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Cool, but that kiln represents a vast amount of distilled knowledge, plus modern metallurgy retroactively applied. (And metal tools to work it.)
It’s hard to imagine the first experimenters thinking “Hmm, I’m going to stick some of this dirt in my pottery kiln and see what happens”, and then adjusting the temperature, times, and so many other details, especially when they have no idea of what the end result is supposed to be.
And then dealing with the people asking “where are those new pots you were supposed to be making?”
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Well, that’s why this technology takes a thousand years to develop. The first incremental steps are always accidental, and it always starts superstitiously. Like, “Hey use this magic dirt here with this magic fuel and the pottery gets orange when wet”. “Hey this magic pottery doesn’t crack when we heat it a lot like the normal stuff does”. “Hey shards of this magic pottery hold an edge!”… and so on.
It’s a very slow process to get the weird new result, then eventually work our way back to what the sources of the new effects are, and how to recreate them anywhere. For thousands of years, humans did a lot of things without necessarily understanding why it all worked.
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I tried my hand at experimental archaeology. 
I hammered this nail out to a thin point, then sharpened it on an axe stone to an edge that will (barely) cut paper.
Time elapsed, approx 5 minutes for forging and 2 minutes for sharpening.
Notes:
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The nail is probably mild steel, so similar in hardness to the low end of the hardness range for iron.
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I didn’t have a suitable rock, so I used a ball peen hammer on a metal anvil. This certainly made it easier and faster, but I think the cold forging principle holds.
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The iron in the video is probably so full of impurities that it could be anything from iron to mild steel (0.1% carbon or so), to cast iron (maybe 5% carbon), even in the same blade, so it’s hard to say how it would behave. As you point out, cast iron is much too brittle for forging, but pure iron is quite ductile and workable. Forging actually increases hardness and tensile strength.
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Whatever the result, the process is obviously extremely tedious, all to produce a knife inferior to one that an experienced flint knapper could turn out in minutes. As you say, the practical use of iron had to wait for a higher level of technology, with bronze as an intermediate step.
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The amazing part is that, like evolution, each step along the way would have to have a positive result so that they’d keep doing it as a base for the next advance.
“Yeah, this funny dirt may not look like much, but in a few hundred years, our descendants will be making magic knives out of it, just you wait!” <= never happened.
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Hmm. There are people who skipped it though. The Beothuks used iron arrowheads and tools…made by a process a lot like yours, taking nails left behind by Europeans and reworking them. For whatever reason they ended up replacing stone versions; the Newfoundland heritage site at least mentions the advantage that they were easier to resharpen.
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Do you know how they worked the meteoritic iron? Clearly, from Tutankhamen’s famous dagger, they were very good at it.
A famous case of exploitation of meteoritic iron is the Cape York meteorites in Greenland, which were used for many centuries by the Inuit people as a source of tool material. The most-used block had a pile of tonnes of basalt hammer stones beside it, brought from elsewhere for the purpose of shaping the iron.
Robert Peary, famous polar explorer and asshole, persuaded the Inuit to show him the location of the three large pieces of iron meteorite. He then stole them and took them back to New York where he sold them for the equivalent of 1.3 million dollars in today’s money.
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This is the key point (pardon the pun) here though. It’s not hardness that matters, so much as plasticity. Iron is not at all plastic, but steel is. Iron is brittle and will crack, so it has to be hot-worked. This is the miracle of steel- it is a version of iron that is also flexible and has tensile strength, which iron does not. Iron is nature’s concrete- grainy in consistency, very dense, and huge compressive strength, but cracks and pulls apart easily.
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Yah, exactly! People always make this mistake when studying evolution. There’s no plan and no goal. It’s incremental changes that are sometimes better in some way, but sometimes not, with no heading or direction in mind. Generally a useful property is then adapted to an unexpected use later. So we look back at all the steps that lead to “eyeball” or “flight” and think it was somehow destiny or was always leading that way, but it wasn’t. Each step was better than the last, but not necessarily as part of a journey towards a complex structure. Early parts of the eyeball might have been useful for camouflage, attracting mates, or whatever.
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The oldest iron items from Egypt are about 5000 years old and are a set of tube-shaped iron beads of meteoritic composition which were made by taking the meteoritic iron, beating it into a sheet and then rolling it up. The metal was never melted as the Widmanstätten structure of the meteorite is still visible.
There is still some disagreement over the origin of the blade in Tutankhamen’s tomb. Whilst the most recent X-ray fluorescence study suggests it is of meteoritic origin, there were previous studies that said the amount of nickel is too low. It is highly likely not of Egyptian manufacture as no other items of similar quality have ever been found from that period. There are a number of other iron blades in the tomb collection, but they are much less well made using technologies seen elsewhere in Egyptian burials.
Instead, it could well be part of a regular trade between Egypt and the Hittite region where iron-working was well advanced. There are 18th Dynasty records from the reign of Akhenaten (Tutankhamen’s father) that iron blades were offered as tribute from Tushratta, King of Mitanni to Amenhotep III (Tutankhamen’s grandfather), so this could be a highly-treasured survivor.
Robert Peary, famous polar explorer and asshole
I think you’re being far too kind!
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