Earliest iron use found in India? Tamil Nadu digs spark debate

Tamil Nadu’s iron artefacts may predate Turkey's Anatolia, reshaping early Iron Age history.

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Their digs have uncovered early scripts that rewrite literacy timelines, mapped maritime trade routes connecting India to the world and revealed advanced urban settlements - reinforcing the state's role as a cradle of early civilisation and global commerce.

Now they've also uncovered something even older - evidence of what could be the earliest making and use of iron. Present-day Turkey is one of the earliest known regions where iron was mined, extracted and forged on a significant scale around the 13th Century BC.

Archaeologists have discovered iron objects at six sites in Tamil Nadu, dating back to 2,953–3,345 BCE, or between 5,000 to 5,400 years old. This suggests that the process of extracting, smelting, forging and shaping iron to create tools, weapons and other objects may have developed independently in the Indian subcontinent.

"The discovery is of such a great importance that it will take some more time before its implications sink in," says Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti, a professor of South Asian archaeology at Cambridge University.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62e36jm4jro

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