Researchers at the Natural History Museum in Bern have concluded that an arrowhead discovered on the shores of a Swiss lake was made some 3,000 years ago, in the Bronze Age, with iron from a meteorite, Swiss Radio Television reported on Wednesday. (RTS).

The tip of 39 millimeters in length and 2.9 grams in weight was already found in the 19th century in Mörigen, a town on the shores of Lake Bienne (northwest of the country), but the extraterrestrial origin of the material with which it was produced is not known. had confirmed so far.

Metal objects from meteorites prior to the Iron Age, which began in Europe around the eighth century BC, are extremely rare, and only 55 have been confirmed so far in the entire Old Continent and in Africa.

A few kilometers from the area where the arrow was found, the so-called “Douanne Mountain meteorite” struck in prehistoric times, which fell 170,000 years ago and is famous in Switzerland for having left more than 2,000 rocky fragments, but scientists have ruled out that the weapon comes from them.

Experts believe that it is more likely that it came from the “Kalijarv meteorite”, another large object that fell to Earth about 3,500 years ago and that impacted in the territory of present-day Estonia, causing several craters up to 100 meters in diameter.

Given the great distance between Estonia and Switzerland, archaeologists estimate that the arrow could have reached the center of Europe through the trade in these metal objects, iron, which for the inhabitants of that time must have been especially rare and precious.

The arrowhead will be part of an exhibition that the museum in the Swiss capital will dedicate to bronze, from February 2024 to April 2025.