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Contact Reflex Analysis™ / Ötzi: The Man in the Ice
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 These days, tattoos are bold fashion statements, but what purpose did they serve 5,000 years ago? Perhaps a medicinal one, says Max Moser, a physiologist at the University of Graz in Austria. He and his colleague Leopold Dorfer reached this conclusion after examining Ötzi, the mummified ice man extracted from a glacier In the Alps In 1991. Ötzi's back, right knee, and left ankle were adorned with 15 groups of short, bluish-black tattooed lines, probably made by injecting ash beneath the skin with a bone or wooden needle. The locations of the tattoos closely match those of traditional acupuncture points used to treat backache and stomach upset.
Significantly, x-rays of Ötzi's body indicate that the middle-aged man had arthritis of the hip joints, knees, ankles, and spine. Forensic analysis also reveals that the ice man's intestines were rife with whipworm eggs.
Ötzi lived some 2000 years before the oldest generally recognized evidence of acupuncture, which raises questions about whether the practice originated in Europe, not China, Moser thinks the history of acupuncture may be even more complicated: "At the time when Ötzi was around, I'm sum that many shamanistic cultures worldwide might have practiced it. But only the Chinese formalized it and saved it into modern times." -- Josie Glaustusz
| LINED UP: Tattooed! markings an the Ice man Ötzi fall along the traditional acupuncture points for trading his ailments. |
When a 5,000-year-old mummified body was pulled from the Alpine ice on the Italian-Austrian border eight years ago, our sense of our ancestors changed. No longer was the Late Stone Age just excavations and artifacts. The Man in the Ice gave it a face - and a surprising sophistication.
One day, as autumn threatened the sudden, brutal storms that pound the high country, a short, stocky man trudged through the Alps. Alone in harsh country, he probably was fleeing enemies who had flushed him from a farming settlement some weeks before. Perhaps those enemies were responsible for the broken ribs that made breathing painful as he struggled across the glacier.
At some point, he lay down in the modest protection of a rocky gully. And there he died — alone, cold, and in pain. The snows began soon after he died, hiding his body from carrion- eaters that would have picked it apart. Frozen and snow-covered, his body remained locked in the gully as the glacier moved ponderously overhead. Then, one unusually warm summer more than 5,000 years later, the ice melted briefly. Ötzi, the Ice Man, was discovered — and he would illuminate the day-to-day life of ancient Europeans in ways a century of archaeological excavations could not.
The Man in the Ice was discovered by two German tourists on September 19, 1991, in the permafrost at an altitude of 3,210 meters (10,531 feet), on the border between Austria and Italy, in the autonomous province of Bolzano/South Tyrol.
Not only was the body preserved, but so was his remarkably complete kit of clothes, tools, and weapons — mostly perishable items that rarely survive for archaeologists to examine.
He was called Ötzi after the Ötz valley in which he was found. Originally considered one of many modern mountaineers who disappeared in the Alps during the past few decades, his recovery initially was left to Austrian police and mountain rescue squads unschooled in archaeological excavation. The body suffered some damage before its antiquity was determined.
Once free of the ice and protected in refrigerated storage, Ötzi faced the full weight of modern science. He was examined, measured, x-rayed, and dated. His tissue was examined microscopically, as was the pollen found on his gear. Five laboratories developed radiocarbon dates for the remains, producing consistent ranges for Ötzi's death of about 5,100 to 5,350 years ago.
The Ice Man in life was 160.5 centimeters (5 feet, 4 inches) tall and between 40 and 45 years old. His body bears a number of tattoos in the form of two parallel lines around the left wrist and sets of stripes or crosses on both sides of the lumbar region of his spine, the right knee, the calves, and ankles. The tattoos are over joints where x-rays found evidence of arthritic damage, suggesting the tattoos were somehow therapeutic.
The real treasure trove, however, was the clothes he wore and the gear he carried. Ötzi clearly was a man familiar with the mountains and well prepared for them. His clothes, including a grass cloak, were surprisingly warm and comfortable. His shoes were remarkably sophisticated: Waterproof and quite wide, they seem designed for walking across the snow. They were constructed using bearskin for the soles, deer hide for top panels, and a netting made of tree bark. Soft grass went around the foot and in the shoe and functioned like warm socks.
His weapons, tools, and stock of replacement materials would permit him to survive away from his home village without regular supplies. He carried an axe with a copper blade and a flint dagger with a scabbard made of plant fibers. The remnants of what apparently was a pack-frame for a knapsack was found. Plant fragments show he had been in a settlement during the time when a grain crop was being harvested and threshed, shortly before his death.
Yet it is also clear that critical parts of the Ice Man's equipment were in extremely poor shape or missing altogether — and that he was trying desperately to replace them. He carried a damaged quiver, for instance, with an unfinished bow, two arrows, and 12 rough arrow shafts. He must have been working on them as he made his doomed crossing of the Alps.
All this suggests Ötzi left somewhere in a great hurry, without taking all his equipment, and that he was trying to elude his pursuers by taking a route over the main Alpine chain. He failed. But Ötzi's lonely death gave him an immortality of sorts. An ambassador from the past, he put a face on our ancestors that changed forever our view of the people of prehistory.
KONRAD SPINDLER is an expert in medicine, anthropology, and archaeology, as well as history. Since 1988, he has occupied the Chair of Pre- and Proto-history at Innsbruck University and served as head of the Department of Medieval and Postmedieval Archaeology. He is the author of numerous books on archaeology.
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