A 3,000-year-old arrowhead found in Switzerland was made from a meteorite, but its exact origins are still puzzling scientists

• A rare Bronze Age arrowhead turns out to be made out of iron from a meteorite, scientists said.
• But in a peculiar twist, it's not from a meteor that fell to earth in the same area of Switzerland.

Scientists in Switzerland have confirmed that a 3,000-year-old arrowhead is made of iron from a meteorite — but a mystery still remains about its origin.

The 1.5-inch arrowhead was found during a 19th-century excavation of a Bronze Age settlement near Mörigen in eastern Switzerland, according to the Natural History Museum of Bern.

The site is two miles away from the debris field of a meteorite known as the Twannberg meteorite — prompting scientists to ask whether it was made of the same space metal.

However, after extensive testing, scientists announced this month that the metal is indeed meteoritic — but that it's not from Twannberg. According to their findings, the nickel content of the arrowhead is about twice as high as metal from the local meteorite debris.

Instead, they wrote, the most likely origin is a lake formed by a meteor nearly 600 miles away in Estonia — a theory they said needs to be studied further.

"This large craterforming fall event happened at [roughly] 1500 years BC during the Bronze Age and produced many small fragments," the study said.

One such fragment may have traveled all the way to Mörigen, lead study author Beda Hofmann told CNN.

"Trade across Europe during the Bronze Age is a well-established fact: Amber from the Baltic (like the arrowhead, presumably), tin from Cornwall, glass beads from Egypt and Mesopotamia," he said by email.

Before humans knew how to smelt iron from oxide ores, they were making use of iron from meteorites, according to the study about the arrowhead.

However, "evidence of such early use of meteoritic iron is extremely rare," the Bern museum said in a statement.

Only 55 ancient meteoritic objects have been discovered across Eurasia and Africa. Nineteen of these were found in King Tutankhamun's tomb, according to the museum.