Hi All,
Actually, I think there's one interesting fact that's left out of here:
there were two groups of native Americans who did have iron, although they seldom used it for weapons, other than perhaps harpoon, spear, and arrow tips.
Both the Inuit and the Dorset people who preceeded them used iron that they broke off three large meteorites that were found at Cape York. They cold-hammered the iron pieces into useable shapes. In effect, there was an "Arctic iron age" using stone-age technology.
About a month ago, I finished reading McGhee's Ancient Peoples of the Arctic which is a fun book if you like archeology.
Figured I should throw that in there. A bigger puzzle is why no one in the Andes learned how to use iron, given that it's relatively common in the cordillera.
F
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