The eggs of whipworm, an irritating intestinal parasite, were found in his digestive tract. Numerous examinations have revealed information about his state of health. The minerals in his teeth shed light on the composition of his drinking water and thus of where he lived as a child. Bones and joints: X-rays disclosed significant wear and tear of joints, including the hips, shoulders, knees and spine.
His twelfth pair of ribs were missing — a rare genetic anomaly. The contents of his stomach were also examined, revealing that his diet consisted of various types of game, grain and plants.
His haplogroup genetic population group is very rare in modern-day Europe and is found almost exclusively among inhabitants of the islands of Sardinia and Corsica who were isolated for long periods. He was probably lactose intolerant, and his blood group was 0 positive. Unlike modern tattoos, they were not made with a needle; they were fine incisions into which pulverised charcoal was rubbed. The tattoos are located near his ribcage and lumbar spine, on his wrist, knee, calves and ankles.
Adornment or therapy? The earliest finds no longer appear peculiar, but fit a pattern that was not visible initially. We have seen the same thing happening during our glacial archaeology work here in Innlandet County, Norway.
Finds that initially appeared odd and hard to understand, turned out to fit a pattern not visible to us, when we first started out. There are now hundreds of sites and thousands of finds.
He is still an odd find. Similar very old finds sealed beneath moving glaciers are unknown. He informed the authorities, both on the Austrian and the Italian side. It was initially not clear whether the find had been made on Austrian or Italian soil. Bad weather delayed the recovery of the body until Monday September The great age and importance of the find was not immediately understood by the authorities. It had been a very warm summer, and several other and more recent bodies had melted out of the ice as well.
Focus was on recovering the body, which is normal procedure, when the dead are returned by the glacial ice.
A number of people visited the site to see the body, before it was recovered. They stepped on the fragile objects and removed artefacts before their locations were noted. This was very unfortunate and led to the destruction of important evidence on the site.
The ice mummy became an immediate sensation. The find spot was investigated by archaeologists shortly after the find was made, but the appalling weather conditions and the onset of winter quickly stopped the fieldwork. A well-organized and thorough excavation of the gully was conducted in in A few more artefacts and a number of fragments were recovered, and a large number of samples were collected.
A painstaking reconstruction of where the artefacts were found was also undertaken, based on interviews with people who had been at the site prior to the first proper investigation. However, it was puzzling that artefacts were found at some distance from the body, such as the quiver, which was found 7 m away.
Together with two colleagues, the archaeologist Konrad Spindler in Innsbruck took charge of the investigations, with the collaboration of a number of colleagues from Austria, Italy and other countries.
Remarkable results concerning his death, his life and his times have been published. Some of his equipment had been damaged in a violent encounter, and he had no time to repair it. He was in pain from broken ribs. Exposed on the surface, he freeze-dried, which led to the exceptional preservation of his body. A short time later, a glacier covered the area, and buried the body and the artifacts for more than five millennia, like in a time capsule.
As glacial archaeologists, we were kindly treated to a guided tour of the museum and told the story of the find and the scientific results. Subsequently, he must have been covered by snow and the glacier ice.
Time of death was believed to be in the late summer or fall. The basis for this conclusion was that a sloe was found near the ice mummy, and sloes ripen in late summer. The excavators of the site pointed in their report to the possibility that the mummy and the finds had been displaced by recurrent thaw and re-freezing processes. An important piece of independent evidence that this might be the case appeared in This time of year may be spring in the valley, but at m where he died, this is still winter.
Even considering the windswept ridge where the find lay, the gully would very likely have been covered in snow, perhaps deep snow. How could he have died down in the gully then? They also believed that the mummy and the finds had been moved by recurrent thaw and re-freezing processes. However, the discussion again drew attention to the uncertainties associated with the natural processes on the site.
This takes us to the next curious aspect of the find — the broken equipment. However, there may be a simpler and more natural explanation for the broken equipment and missing pieces. We learned from a careful analysis of our Lendbreen site is that there are a number of natural processes that affect artefacts lost on the surface of snow and ice.
The simple version is that the artefacts may displace from the original place of deposition, they may break into pieces and the broken pieces may scatter.
Often artefacts go through all three processes. The snow and ice cover will melt away during very warm summers, and some of the artefacts originally lost on the ice and snow will melt into hollows below.
Such hollows are more protected from the elements and are more likely to preserve snow and ice over the summer, i. Artefacts that do not make it into such hollows are more likely to be lost over time, as they are more exposed. The exposed artefacts gradually disappear, with wood and birch bark being the last materials to preserve.
And of course, the arrow lodged in his left shoulder was likely the ultimate cause of death. In the early s, scientists conducted a DNA analysis of samples of digested food collected from his colon. The discovery of red deer in his digestive system is especially interesting, since depictions of that animal figure prominently in archaeological finds throughout the Alps in this time period. Among modern adults, about 10—20 percent have this gap. Around 35 percent of people today lack wisdom teeth.
This lack of ribs is not unheard of, but it only affects about 5 percent of the population. Another study in tested thousands of modern men in the Alps and discovered that 19 men in the sample shared a genetic lineage with the Iceman.
His maternal DNA line, however, appears to be extinct. We all know that every ancient mummy is cursed, so of course the Iceman has his own story. Helmut Simon , one of the two hikers who discovered the Iceman, died falling off the side of a mountain. His belongings, scattered around the body, included a bow and quiver with arrows, a complete copper-bladed axe, a flint dagger with a wicker sheath, two birch wood vessels clad with maple leaves, remnants of a backpack, a leather pouch with small objects, fur and leather garments, shoes, and other minor artifacts.
On the way or on the pass, he was mortally wounded in an armed attack. With an arrow deeply sunk in his left shoulder, he collapsed in solitude on the mountaintop, bleeding to death.
His body would have been rapidly dried by a strong, warm wind, and was soon covered by frozen snow. No signs of scavenging activity were visible on the body, and all the equipment was left untouched. Such a dramatic and even romantic reconstruction was simple to communicate and visualize. Even after careful excavations in , the complete crime scene findspot was not reconstructed. After 20 years, a detailed topographic map of more than artifacts found at the site and the analysis of their distribution with computer-aided simulations revealed that body and objects had moved downslope with the ice flow, but originally came from a spot measuring about 2 x 1 meters a little more than 6 feet x 3 feet.
In , a study was published suggesting that the mummy might owe its exceptional preservation to a proper burial and the equipment might not be a mountain survival kit, but rather what was needed for a yet more arduous trip—the voyage to the otherworld.
These findings paved the way for a comprehensive alternative interpretation. This interpretation accounts for many anomalies, such as the unexplained mode of preservation of the body, unfinished arrows, shoes unsuitable for climbing, and the cumbersome equipment he supposedly carried.
Almost universal agreement indicates that the mummy is not an artifact of human action, like Egyptian Dynastic mummies. The mummy is much better preserved than more recent bodies found in similar glaciers, underscoring its importance. Aeolian desiccation may be due to natural or intentional processes. To keep him publicly viewable while minimizing risk of damage and decay is a demanding and costly challenge. Healed injuries, such as a hand dagger wound and the fatal arrow shot, possibly coupled with a blow to the head, suggest regular warfare and imply the use of different weapons.
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