Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (43 page)

@ Innsbruck Medical University, W. Platzer.

Skeleton of the Ice Man at Innsbruck Medical University.

On a clear day in September 1991,
high in the desolate Otztal Alps, close
to the border between Italy and Austria, two German hikers (Helmut and
Erika Simon) made what has proven
to be one of the most incredible discoveries of the 20th century. Lying face
down in the ice was a frozen body.
Thinking they had found the remains
of a mountaineer who had died in a
fall, the couple informed the authorities, who arranged to visit the site the
following day. Due to the melting of
the glacier, it was not unusual to find
the bodies of climbers who had died in
accidents in the area. Three weeks
earlier, the mummified remains of a
man and woman who had set off hiking in 1934, never to be seen again, had
been discovered. The day after Helmut
and Erika Simon's discovery, the Austrian police arrived at the site and be

gan, somewhat clumsily, to remove the
body from its frozen grave. During its
extraction from the ice, some of the
body's clothing was shredded, a hole
was punched in the hip with a jackhammer, and its left arm was snapped
while attempting to force the body into
a coffin.

The body was transported to the
University of Innsbruck, where a careful examination revealed that it was
definitely not a modern mountaineer.
Radiocarbon dating showed that the
remains were of a man who had died
around 3200 B.C. (in the Late Neolithic
period) and was thus the oldest preserved human body ever discovered.
Further examinations of Otzi, as he
has become known (because he was
found in the Otztal Alps), followed, and
it was determined that he was 5-feet
2-inches tall and between 40 and 50 years of age when he died, although
the cause of death remained a mystery.
Analysis of his stomach contents revealed the remains of two meals, the
last eaten about eight hours before he
died and consisting of a piece of unleavened bread made of einkorn
wheat, some roots, and red deer meat.
Analysis of extremely well-preserved
pollen from the intestines revealed
that Otzi died in late spring or early
summer.

Otzi had a total of 57 tattoos on his
body, comprising small parallel stripes
and crosses, which were made with a
charcoal-based pigment. As the tattoos
were concentrated around the spine,
lumbar region, knees, and ankles, it is
believed that they may not have been
decorative. Examination of the Ice
Man's skeleton revealed that he had
been suffering from arthritis, and the
positioning of the tattoos at known
acupuncture points has persuaded
many researchers that Otzi's tattoos
served a therapeutic purpose.

The remains of the the Ice Man's
clothing were fairly well-preserved by
the ice. When he died, Otzi was wearing shoes made from a combination of
bearskin soles and a top of deer hide
and tree bark, with soft grass stuffed
inside for warmth. He also wore a woven grass cloak, which he probably also
used as a blanket, and a leather vest
and fur cap. Alongside the body, various articles, which the Ice Man had
been carrying with him on his last journey, were also discovered. These items
consisted of a copper axe with a yew
handle, an unfinished yew longbow, a
deerskin quiver with two flint-tipped
arrows and 12 unfinished shafts, a flint
knife and scabbord, a calfskin belt

pouch, a medicine bag containing medicinal fungus, a flint and pyrite for
creating sparks, a goat-fur rucksack,
and a tassel with a stone bead. All of
this was invaluable material for painting a picture of the life and death of
the Ice Man.

But who was this mysterious traveller, and what had prompted him to
venture 1.8 miles up into the desolate
Otzal Alps? DNA analysis has shown
that Otzi was most closely related to
Europeans living around the Alps.
Further isotopic analysis of his teeth
and bones by geochemist Wolfgang
Muller, of the Australian National University, together with colleagues in the
United States and Switzerland, have
narrowed Otzi's birthplace down to a
site near to the Italian Tyrol village of
Feldthurns, north of present-day
Bolzano, about 30 miles southeast of
the place where he met his death. High
levels of copper and arsenic found in
Otzi's hair show that he had taken part
in copper smelting, probably making
his own weapons and tools.

The first widely held theory as to
why the Ice Man was travelling alone
up in the Otztal Alps (and how he met
his death) was that he was a shepherd
who had been taking care of his flock
in an upland pasture. The hypothesis
was that he had been caught in an unseasonable storm and found shelter in
the shallow gully where he was found.
A variant on this theory, proposed by
Dr. Konrad Spindler, leader of the scientific investigation into the Ice Man,
was based on early x-rays of the body
taken at Innsbruck. These x-rays appear to show broken ribs on the body's
right side, which Spindler believed
were the result of some kind of fight which Otzi had become involved in
while returning to his home village
with his sheep. Although Otzi had escaped the battle with his life, he eventually died of the injuries in the place
where the hikers found him more than
5,000 years later. But new examinations of the body in 2001 by scientists
at a laboratory in Bolanzo showed that
the ribs had been bent out of shape
after death, due to snow and ice pressing against the ribcage. Another theory
connected the Ice Man with the various bog bodies, such as Tollund Man
and Lindow Man, recovered from the
peat bogs of northern Europe. Many
of the first millennium B.c. examples
of these bodies show that the victims
had eaten a last meal similar to that
of the Ice Man just before their death,
and appear to have been ritually sacrificed before being thrown into the
bog. Could the Ice Man have been a
ritual sacrifice? Dramatic findings
from the examinations at Bolanzo suggested otherwise.

A CAT scan of the body showed a
foreign object located near the shoulder, in the shape of an arrow. Further
examinations revealed that Otzi had
a flint arrowhead lodged in his shoulder. The Ice Man had been murdered.
A small tear discovered in Otzi's coat
appears to be where the arrow entered
the body. In June 2002, the same team
of scientists discovered a deep wound
on the Ice Man's hand, and further
bruises and cuts on his wrists and
chest, seemingly defensive wounds, all
inflicted only hours before his death.
Fascinatingly, DNA analysis shows
traces of blood from four separate
people on Otzi's clothes and weapons:
one sequence from his knife blade,

two different sequences from the same
arrowhead, and a fourth from his
goatskin coat. In light of these recent
discoveries, various new theories have
been put forward to explain what exactly happened to the Ice Man.

The presence of only the flint tip
of the arrowhead in the body indicates
that either Otzi or a companion must
have pulled the wooden shaft of the
arrow out. The CAT scan revealed that
the fatal arrow had been shot from
below and ripped upwards through
nerves and major blood vessels before
it lodged in the left shoulder blade,
paralyzing his left arm. The blood on
his coat may indicate that Otzi's companion was also wounded and had to
be carried on his shoulder. One scenario which has been suggested is that
Otzi and one or two companions were
a hunting group who took part in a
battle with a rival party, perhaps over
territory. The blood on Otzi's weapons
graphically illustrates that he must
have killed two of the enemy party,
removing his valuable arrowhead from
one body and then using it again, before receiving his own fatal wound.

Not everyone, however, agrees
with this version of events. According
to Walter Leitner of the Institute for
Ancient and Early History at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, Otzi
may have been a Shaman. Leitner believes that, because copper was a
scarce material in the Late Neolithic
period, only someone of great importance in the community would have
owned a copper axe. Shamans are also
known to commune with the spirit
world in remote locations, such as high
mountains. Otzi was probably murdered, Leitner thinks, but not in an argument over territory, but rather by
a rival group from the same community who wanted to assume power. By
killing the Shaman and claiming he
died in an accident, this end may have
been achieved. A further alternative
hypothesis is a sacrificial death where
the victim was ritually hunted down
and shot in the back with an arrow.
Such ritual killings are recorded by
Roman chroniclers as being practiced
by the Celts, and there is archaeological evidence from a skeleton discovered in the outer ditch at Stonehenge
that this kind of sacrifice took place
there (see Stonehenge article).

Photograph by Kogo. (GNU Free
Documentation License).

Otzi Memorial, Otztal.

Recently, a startling claim was
made by Lorenzo Dal Ri, director of
the archaeological office of the Bolzano
province. Dal Ri believes that the Ice
Man's death may actually have been
recorded on an ancient stone stela. The
decorated stone, of roughly the same
age as the Ice Man, had been used to
build the altar of a church in Laces, a
town close to the area where the discovery of Otzi was made. One of the
many carvings on the stela shows an
archer poised to fire an arrow into the
back of another unarmed man who appears to be running away. Although
there is no direct evidence to link the
stone with the murder of the Ice Man,
the resemblance between the carved
image and the death of Otzi is uncanny.

In February 2006, further light
was thrown on the Ice Man when
Dr. Franco Rollo (of the University of
Camerino in Italy) and colleagues examined mitochondrial DNA (DNA
only inherited through the mother)
taken from cells in the Ice Man's intestines. The team's conclusion was that

Otzi may have been infertile. Dr. Rollo
hypothesized that the social implications of his not being able to father offspring may have been a factor in the
circumstances which led to his death.

Since his discovery in 1991, Otzi
has achieved such popularity that he
even has his own version of the "Curse
of Tutankhamun." It has to be admitted that there appears to be a high
rate of mortality among the researchers connected with the discovery of
the Ice Man. Apparently the latest
victim was 63-year-old molecular
archaeologist Tom Loy, the discoverer
of the human blood on Otzi's clothes
and weapons, who died in mysterious circumstances in Australia in October
2005. Two other well-known names
connected with Otzi who have passed
away recently include Dr. Konrad
Spindler, head of the Ice Man investigation team at Innsbruck University,
who died in April 2005, apparently
from complications arising from multiple sclerosis; and the Iceman's original discoverer, 67-year-old Helmut
Simon, who plunged 300 feet to his
death in the Austrian Alps, in October 2004. Incidentally Dieter
Warnecke, one of the men who found
Simon's frozen body, died of a heart
attack shortly after Simon's funeral.
However, sceptics argue that the death
of five or six people associated with

the Ice Man over a 14 year period is
not a particularly unusual amount,
they also point out that mountaineers
naturally have a high rate of mortality
due to the dangers of their pursuit.

There are still many unanswered
questions about the life and death of
Otzi, now on display at the South Tyrol
Museum of Archaeology in BozenBolzano, Italy. Hopefully the answers
to some of these questions will become
apparent when scientists conduct the
autopsy to remove the flint arrowhead
from the Ice Man's shoulder. It looks
like we will have to wait until then for
more information on how and why Otzi
met his death in the frozen Alps, more
than 5,000 years ago.