Until iron could be made from iron ore, almost all iron metal on Earth was meteoric in origin, so this finding is not very surprising. In damp areas, it would not last very long, for obvious reasons. In drier areas (i.e., deserts), longer. It was probably MUCH rarer than gold, hence, very valuable.
Hard to believe, only 175 years ago, aluminum metal was worth more than gold.
:’) There’s been quite a bit of denial in our history that the Earth gets struck from above, and there still is here and there. That’s as old as Aristotle, who declared that stones can’t fall from the sky. That said, the iron on Earth’s crust mostly belched up out of some volcano or other, I left the gist of the debate in the excerpt, there’s a little more at the original.