Twelve hundred years ago in the High Arctic, the Inuit mastered spaceborne technology by hand. All over the world, human history followed similar paths. The Stone Age featured the earliest stone tools. Then people built hot furnaces to melt copper and tin into bronze. Finally came iron, which required intense fire to extract metal from rock. Each step required wood or coal to burn. In the Arctic, trees do not grow and coal was buried deep underground. For thousands of years, the Inuit used bone, driftwood, and rock to survive.
Then the Dorset culture began making iron tools, skipping the Bronze Age entirely. They discovered a meteorite that fell ten thousand years ago in Northern Greenland. The meteorite was made of an iron and nickel alloy. Nickel makes metal tough and resistant to corrosion. This gave them a massive advantage when hunting in freezing seawater.
They travelled fifty kilometres to find volcanic basalt stones to use as hammers. The craftspeople carved thin slots into walrus ivory handles and fitted the overlapping metallic flakes side by side inside the grooves. As wet sinew wrapped around the handle dried and shrank, it locked the blades permanently in place. Archaeologists have tracked this Cape York meteoritic iron thousands of miles away across the Canadian Arctic. It shows how humans everywhere take advantage of available resources, and sometimes those resources are delivered from outer space.
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