Recent research has led to a significant change in the dating of the beginning of iron production in Central Europe. It is remarkable that the oldest 14C-dates for smelting furnaces among Etruscan Italy, Late Hallstatt Southern Germany, Brandenburg Jastorf culture and Jutland yield more or less the same results. Obviously the process of innovation was not connected to the structure of the societies involved, but to the willingness to adopt the new technology. A revision of the situation in iron age Poland showed that neither the Post-Lausitz Groups nor the early phases of the Przeworsk culture produced iron by themselves – until the end of the iron age the innovation was not attractive enough to replace imports of the important raw material.