Mithril Armor?

[Ebony]

Although modern mining techniques allow efficient extraction of minerals from low-grade ore, I think we have to assume that the technology of ME was not advanced enough yet to do this. Since we don't know where Mithril lies on the periodic table, we don't know if is a noble metal (like gold and silver) which is easily found in it's free state in nature, or one that is more difficult to reduce, like aluminum, which is almost never found in it's free state. I have often wondered if mithril might actually be aluminum, considering it's light weight (which means it must have a low atomic weight), strong, silver in colour, and rare. Before the introduction of electricity into refining, Aluminum was a very rare and precious metal, as in nature it is nearly always combined with another element, and very difficult to reduce down to it's pure form. The difficulty with this theory, of course, is that aluminum is somewhat softer than dragon scales, but perhaps we can allow that the dwarves may have had techniques of hardening metals non-existant in our world.