Hasta La Ideas

In the early 1900s, guys dressed like Indiana Jones were ripping through Egyptian tombs in a somewhat shameless search for treasure. In 1911 a collection of elementally rare beads was uncovered in a 5,000-year-old tomb south of Cairo. Primitive early-20th-century tests revealed the beads had an unusually high nickel content, and it was assumed that they were carved out of meteorites.

As Live Science reports, archaeology professor Thilo Rehren recently made a more startling discovery. By X-raying the beads, Rehren and his team observed an elemental composition consistent with iron meteorites, which merely confirmed suspicions; but the X-rays also showed that these beads were actually tubes, of the sort that can only be made by forging metal into thin sheets and then rolling it.

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