And here we have one that's literally older than dirt.http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThunderboltIron
Because in a lot of cases, the impact's what led to the dirt in the first place.
As the article notes, before mining was developed (and that's a work still very much in progress), the only way to get any real quantities of iron was to hope it fell on something, and hopefully that something wasn't you. And then you took it somewhere, beat it into the shape you needed, and left the discoveries of nickel and iridium to someone a few centuries down the line. Meteoric iron can be superior to native -- but you have to get lucky with both material and technique.
If you have the right kind of museum, you should go touch a meteor. Everyone should do it at least once. It's as close as most of us are going to get to the source.