For thousands of years, a giant iron meteorite lay in the far north of Greenland, where generations of Inuit travelled to it as their only source of metal for knives and harpoons — until the American explorer Robert Peary spent three years hauling the 31-

For thousands of years, a giant iron meteorite lay in the far north of Greenland, where generations of Inuit travelled to it as their only source of metal for knives and harpoons — until the American explorer Robert Peary spent three years hauling the 31-

Somewhere around 10,000 years ago, a mass of iron from space struck the far north of Greenland. It broke apart as it fell, scattering across the region near Cape York in several enormous fragments. The largest of them weighed about 31 tons. And there, on the islands and frozen ground of one of the most remote places on Earth, the iron sat — and waited for someone to find it. Someone did. Not European scientists, not explorers. The Inuit of north…