Posted by EarthSky Voices in EARTH | HUMAN WORLD | February 5, 2020
I’ve always found the story of “Ötzi the Iceman” to be a fascinating look into the past. Now there is more evidence that has been uncovered about Ötzi’s last days.
After 5,300 years, Ötzi the Iceman continues to divulge secrets. Archaeobotanists recently identified 75 different species of mosses and liverworts that were sprinkled on the neolithic man’s clothing, sequestered in his gut, and buried in the icy gully where he lay for millennia after his murder at the Schnalstal glacier in the Ötzal Alps of southern Austria and northern Italy. Many of these bryophtyes — another term for mosses and liverworts — aren’t local to the spot where the Iceman was found. They reveal information about his movements in the final 48 hours of his life. A study detailing the new findings was published this past fall (October 30, 2019) in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
When the Iceman (nicknamed Ötzi after the Ötzal Alps where he was found) was discovered by two hikers in South Tyrol, Italy, in 1991, he was lying face down in a frozen gully. He had been killed over 5,000 years prior – shot through the back with an arrow – but the glacier’s ice preserved his corpse. Also captured in the ice around his shriveled body was a menagerie of neolithic plants and fungi. The lead author of the study, Jim Dickson, told GlacierHub:
The thought that it is possible to use plant remains to work out the details of a 5,000 year-old guy’s last days is very appealing!
Dickson, now retired, was a professor of archaeobotany at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland. Ötzi, for his part, lies frozen in a cold cell in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.
Read the full story at, https://earthsky.org/earth/otzi-the-iceman-mummy-ancient-mosses
