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Otzi The 'Iceman'

Health Services were better back in those days.

5000-year-old ‘Iceman’ may have benefited from a sophisticated health care system
By Joshua Rapp LearnSep. 7, 2018 , 2:40 PM

Ötzi, the 5300-year-old “Iceman” discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991, was a medical mess. His teeth were rotting, he had a bad stomach bug, and his knees were beginning to degenerate—not to mention the arrow in his back that probably killed him. Now, a new study concludes the herbs and tattoos he seems to have used to treat his ailments may have been common around this time, suggesting a sophisticated culture of health care at this point in human history.

Previous studies have found that Ötzi carried a number of suspected medicines either on him or in him. Fastened to leather bands in his equipment, researchers found the birch polypore fungus, which the Iceman may have used to calm inflammation or as an antibiotic. Scientists also found bracken fern in his stomach, which can be used to treat intestinal parasites such as tapeworm. And Ötzi was covered with 61 tattoos (such as the one on his back, pictured above) including dotlike points around joints, which some researchers believe may have been used as pain treatment akin to an early form of acupuncture. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ve-benefited-sophisticated-health-care-system
 
ramonmercado said:
Health Services were better back in those days.

5000-year-old ‘Iceman’ may have benefited from a sophisticated health care system
By Joshua Rapp LearnSep. 7, 2018 , 2:40 PM

Ötzi, the 5300-year-old “Iceman” discovered frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991, was a medical mess. His teeth were rotting, he had a bad stomach bug, and his knees were beginning to degenerate—not to mention the arrow in his back that probably killed him. Now, a new study concludes the herbs and tattoos he seems to have used to treat his ailments may have been common around this time, suggesting a sophisticated culture of health care at this point in human history.

Previous studies have found that Ötzi carried a number of suspected medicines either on him or in him. Fastened to leather bands in his equipment, researchers found the birch polypore fungus, which the Iceman may have used to calm inflammation or as an antibiotic. Scientists also found bracken fern in his stomach, which can be used to treat intestinal parasites such as tapeworm. And Ötzi was covered with 61 tattoos (such as the one on his back, pictured above) including dotlike points around joints, which some researchers believe may have been used as pain treatment akin to an early form of acupuncture. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018...ve-benefited-sophisticated-health-care-system
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The NHS.
Neolithic Health Service.
 
Newly published ice analysis suggests the scene of Ötzi's death may have had far less ice cover than it does at present. There's even a chance he didn't die on ice at all.
Ötzi the Iceman may have scaled ice-free Alps

During or just before the life of the Copper Age wanderer, many high peaks in the Alps were ice-free. ...

Ötzi the Iceman, a Copper Age wanderer found mummified in the Alps nearly three decades ago, may have lived at a time when the glaciers were advancing down from the highest peaks to the lower slopes of the mountains.

The ice that preserved Ötzi upon his death in about 3300 B.C. has melted since the mummy was discovered in 1991. But a new analysis of ice only 7.4 miles (12 kilometers) from where Ötzi was found suggests that only the very highest peaks were covered in glaciers until slightly before the iceman's lifetime. Just a few hundred years before Ötzi was born, nearby mountains may have been ice-free.

The findings suggest that during the Holocene, the epoch covering 11,650 years ago to the present, glaciers in the Alps have changed dramatically. ...

"Our main finding is that the ice is 5,900 years old, more or less, which is just a bit older than the iceman," said Pascal Bohleber, who studies glacial ice at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. "This suggests that, in this region, we had a time where glaciers started to form in conditions that were ice-free or with glaciers distinctly smaller than today." ...

Unfortunately, the research can't directly answer one enduring mystery about Ötzi: whether he died in an ice field or the ice entombed him soon after. The ice around the mummy melted before scientists had the technology to date minuscule amounts of carbon as they can today, so there's no way to investigate the question directly. It's not clear whether the glaciers had advanced to where the iceman died, but the new results do show that it was icy a short hike away. ...
Click to expand...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/otzi-iceman-lived-in-ice-free-alpine.html
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published research report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Bohleber, P., Schwikowski, M., Stocker-Waldhuber, M. et al.
New glacier evidence for ice-free summits during the life of the Tyrolean Iceman.
Sci Rep 10, 20513 (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77518-9

Abstract
Detailed knowledge of Holocene climate and glaciers dynamics is essential for sustainable development in warming mountain regions. Yet information about Holocene glacier coverage in the Alps before the Little Ice Age stems mostly from studying advances of glacier tongues at lower elevations. Here we present a new approach to reconstructing past glacier low stands and ice-free conditions by assessing and dating the oldest ice preserved at high elevations. A previously unexplored ice dome at Weißseespitze summit (3500 m), near where the “Tyrolean Iceman” was found, offers almost ideal conditions for preserving the original ice formed at the site. The glaciological settings and state-of-the-art micro-radiocarbon age constraints indicate that the summit has been glaciated for about 5900 years. In combination with known maximum ages of other high Alpine glaciers, we present evidence for an elevation gradient of neoglaciation onset. It reveals that in the Alps only the highest elevation sites remained ice-covered throughout the Holocene. Just before the life of the Iceman, high Alpine summits were emerging from nearly ice-free conditions, during the start of a Mid-Holocene neoglaciation. We demonstrate that, under specific circumstances, the old ice at the base of high Alpine glaciers is a sensitive archive of glacier change. However, under current melt rates the archive at Weißseespitze and at similar locations will be lost within the next two decades.

SOURCE: FULL REPORT:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77518-9#citeas
 
There may be more Otzis out there.

‘Iceman’ discovery wasn’t a freak event. More frozen mummies may await​


In 1991, hikers in the Alps came across a sensational find: a human body, partially encased in ice, at the top of a mountain pass between Italy and Austria. Police called to the scene initially assumed the man had died in a mountaineering accident, but within weeks archaeologists were arguing he was actually the victim of a 5100-year-old murder.

They were right: Later dubbed Ötzi after the Ötztal Valley nearby, the man’s body is the oldest known “ice mummy” on record. His physical condition, equipment, and violent death—confirmed when x-ray and CT scans revealed an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder—have opened a window on life in prehistoric Europe. But Ötzi’s preservation may not be as unusual as it first seemed, archaeologists argue in a paper published today. And that could mean more bodies from the distant past are waiting to emerge as ice melts in a warming climate.

Ötzi “was such a huge surprise when he was found people thought he was a freak event,” says Lars Pilø, an archaeologist working for the Oppland County Glacier Archaeological Program in Norway. But many of the original assumptions about how weather, climate, and glacial ice conspired to preserve him were wrong, Pilø and other researchers write in the journal The Holocene. “This paper sheds new light on the interpretation of this exceptional archaeological find,” says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich, who was not part of the team.

The first archaeologist on the scene 30 years ago, a researcher at the nearby University of Innsbruck named Konrad Spindler, was stunned by the body’s remarkable preservation and came up with a plausible explanation. Damage to Ötzi’s backpack and other equipment led Spindler, who died in 2005, to suggest he was fleeing a conflict and had taken refuge in the mountains late in the year. After dying on a high mountain pass, he was quickly covered by winter snow. A climate shift soon thereafter sent temperatures plunging for centuries or longer, preserving the man’s body in an icy glacial “time capsule.”

https://www.science.org/content/art...n-t-freak-event-more-frozen-mummies-may-await
 
Otzi latest

“It was previously believed that his skin has darkened during the mummification process,” said Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummy Studies at Eurac Research, a private research center based in Bolzano.

“It seems that the dark skin color of the mummy is quite close to the Iceman’s skin color during (his) lifetime,” said Zink, who is a coauthor of the research published Wednesday in the scientific journal Cell Genomics.
When the researchers of the new study compared Ötzi’s genome with those of other ancient humans, they found he had more in common with early Anatolian farmers — from what is now Turkey — who did not have much interaction with his European hunter-gatherer contemporaries.

“It does not completely change our knowledge about the Iceman but makes some things clearer,” Zink explained. “It shows that the Iceman most likely lived in a relatively isolated area with only limited contact to other populations and low gene flow from hunter-gatherer-ancestry-related populations.”
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Artist Tattooed Himself to Solve Mystery of Ötzi The Iceman's Tattoos


A man who died around 5,300 years ago was tattooed using methods fascinatingly similar to modern ones.

Ötzi the Iceman, whose exceptionally mummified remains were found decades ago in a glacier in the Ötztal Alps, was covered in tattoos. Scientists carefully studying his remains have counted 61 carbon pigment markings on his lower back, abdomen, left wrist, and lower legs.

The accepted explanation for the application of these tattoos was soot rubbed into cuts made in Ötzi's skin. Now, a team of scientists and tattoo artists has called this into significant question. How? By creating tattoos with different methods, letting them heal, and comparing the results with the tattoos on Ötzi.

tattoos-riday.jpg


Tattoos on Riday's leg the day they were made (left) and six months later (right). (Deter-Wolf et al., Exarc, 2022)

Deter-Wolf and his colleagues, tattoo artists Danny Riday of The Temple Tattoo in New Zealand and Maya Sialuk Jacobsen of Inuit Tattoo Traditions in Denmark, conducted a 2022 study using eight different tools across four different tattooing techniques to inscribe a repeated identical motif on Riday's leg.

These included tools made of animal bone, obsidian, copper, boar tusk, and a modern steel needle. The techniques consisted of hand-tapping, hand-poking, incision, and subdermal tattooing, in which a piece of bone is poked through the skin and out through a second puncture to place ink under the skin.

The researchers then carefully documented the healing process, the healed scars, and the appearance of each tattoo over time. This provided a database against which they could compare ancient tattoos for their new study.

They found that, contrary to the accepted explanation, the tattoos on Ötzi were probably not made with the incision technique. Instead, the physical properties of the tattoos – stippling, line widths, rounded ends, and the diffusion of ink at the edges – most closely match hand-poking with a single-pointed tool.

"We ultimately proposed that Ötzi's tattoos were made by puncture, likely using either a bone or copper awl," Deter-Wolf [said].

https://www.sciencealert.com/artist-tattooed-himself-to-solve-mystery-of-tzi-the-icemans-tattoos

maximus otter
 
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