Ötzi’s last supper: mummified hunter's final meal revealed

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/12/otzis-last-supper-mummified-hunters-final-meal-revealed

by diodorus • 8 years ago

72 40 8 years ago

theguardian.com

rpvnwnkl• 8 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13962441 ?

acqq2• 8 years ago

It’s certainly not! The research paper now is from 12th of July this year, the brand new result:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...

vanattab• 8 years ago

Wow! why is everyone down voting this guys comment? He never said this previous discussion was about the contents of his stomach he just said here is a thread about the same ancient dead guy. I for one am glad he posted it so I could learn more about the same topic. I find it disgusting that one guy lays out an unjustified criticism and you all jump on the band wagon and downvote him to oblivion. Rpvnwnki6 thanks for linking to the old thread about otzi I appreciated reading the related thread.

curtis• 8 years ago

It's kind of amazing to me that we are still learning stuff from Ötzi's remains since they were discovered back in 1991.

ItsMe000001• 8 years ago

Not to forget: He's the only person from his period, for thousands of years in either direction, who has a homepage on the Internet!

http://www.iceman.it/en/

mahesh_rm3• 8 years ago

How is bacon of a clearly delicious animal - I am from the Alps, but never tasted the specific animal due to it being protected, and rightly so - considered of "horrible taste"? I guess they - maybe - didn't have salt, but they still had smoke, and - you know - sun.

Semirhage• 8 years ago

Bacon is cured belly meat, whereas this was apparently pure fat. Fat tends to concentrate flavors, good or bad, and in this case it would have probably be very very gamey.

Edit: I think we have to see a difference between domesticated pigs, bred and raised for purpose, and their cured, seasoned, fat... and some fat hacked off a wild ibex. If you’ve ever had wild game you’ll know what I mean about gamey flavors. I can only imagine that some ice age ibex would be an acquired taste at best. Pig fat is also some of the most delicious, mild fat around, which is why it’s pigs used in that article.

mahesh_rm3• 8 years ago

You mean, like this? http://www.emikodavies.com/blog/italian-table-talk-lardo-di-... What is called "Lardo" is considered gourmet in most Italian / European traditional cuisines, and I can clearly see people in 2018 easily paying hundreds of dollars for a kilo of Ibex lard. I understand curing it might optimize the taste, but I would not call dried/smoked lard horrible.

merpnderp2• 8 years ago

Wild hog is some of the most disgusting meat I've ever had. Gamey strong flavored like I was eating meat flavored with sour weeds. The bacon was inedible it was so bad.

Absolutely nothing like the sweet tasty pig you get from the store.

pvaldes3• 8 years ago

Meat of old male goats is infamous for having a strong taste (Hormonally flavoured). They are routinely castrated or eaten young by this reason. A wild goat would taste even stronger. Maybe this is the reason of the journalist not enjoying the taste. Eating fat of a doe could be a different experience.

noetic_techy• 8 years ago

The keto and zerocarb (carnivore diet) communities on reddit are all pointing out the fact that 46% by volume of the sample was fat, indicating he gained 60%+ by calorie macro of energy from fat (and a large percentage of proteins). There is a compelling argument being made now that humans are more carnivore than omnivore for most of our history (10,000 of agriculture is blip on the radar for our species) and that we ate the whole animal. Yes, we can eat anything, but did we. And which food sources are we most adapted for? Hence The Omnivores Dilemma ... (good book)

nkrisc• 8 years ago

It's not mentioned in The Guardian article but is mentioned in this one from Ars Technica that he also had atherosclerosis, something his high fat diet likely contributed to. I'm not 100% sold on trying to replicate the diet and lifestyle of people who probably did not live past what we now consider middle age. Particularly if I'm not living in the high reaches of the Alps.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/otzi-the-icemans-las...

cgh• 8 years ago

As has been pointed out elsewhere[1], atherosclerosis is largely a genetic condition and is not necessarily related to a high-fat diet.

"In the new study, Zink and his colleagues found that Ötzi had several gene variants associated with cardiovascular disease, including one on the ninth chromosome that is strongly tied to heart troubles, the researchers reported today (July 30) in the journal Global Heart."[2]

Fun fact: Otzi also had Lyme disease.

Also, there is no evidence that Otzi's people died young because of their diets. He was 45, so approaching middle age, and died while making a high mountain traverse with an arrow in his back. I would bet anything he was physically sturdier and, with modern medical care, healthier than nearly everyone posting here.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/02/iceman-was-medical-me...

2] https://www.livescience.com/47114-otzi-had-heart-disease-gen...

ameixaseca• 8 years ago

Likely or likely not? More recent evidence points to high carb - not high fat - as the real cause. Mcmuffins are higher in carbs than fats, by the way.

Also, infant/child mortality was much higher at that time - if you count people that lived past the 30s life expectancy was likely not that different from nowadays.

clumsysmurf• 8 years ago

The researchers mention in other sources:

"Interestingly adipose fat, most likely from the ibex, made up about half of the stomach contents. The team says this amount was unexpected, but it makes sense given he was living in such a hostile climate."

"The high and cold environment is particularly challenging for the human physiology and requires optimal nutrient supply to avoid rapid starvation and energy loss," says Albert Zink, an author of the study. "The Iceman seemed to have been fully aware that fat represents an excellent energy source."

acqq2• 8 years ago

The actual paper mentions:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...

"major proportion of plant reads belong to the species Pteridium aquilinum subsp. aquilinum and to members of the genus Triticum "

"the Triticum reads were more specifically assigned to chloroplast genomes of Triticum monococcum (einkorn) and Triticum urartu"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einkorn_wheat

Wheat.

It seem the Iceman not only ate deer mean but also... wheat, so probably some kind of bread.

Also, for the context: the Iceman lived "between 3400 and 3100 BCE." It can be that he lived at the same time as Egypt already wrote about its first pharaohs (c. 3150 BCE)! And Egypt's key for success for millennia was in its... wheat production.

Moreover, the "Iceman" got frozen in ice by accident, but at that time the last ice age was also over for cca 5000 years.

pvaldes3• 8 years ago

You can make a bread using braken flour. Is toxic at long term, but canker is not a problem if you are in a hurry and do not plan to live more than 50 years in any case. Probably they would combine Triticum and Pteridium together making a more palatable product.

Many things could point to stolen food and a harsh conditions. He was probably desperate for food. For a human eating fat regularly, he was very slim.

feral• 8 years ago

(10,000 of agriculture is blip on the radar for our species)

Just to point out, those 10k years of agriculture are actually the most recent 10k years, with potentially huge selection pressure for periods during that time.

dbcurtis2• 8 years ago

I followed the 1986 Will Steger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Steger expedition to the North Pole quite closely at the time. I recall they spent a lot of time developing and preparing foods for the journey, in particular a high-fat pemmican. They also ate huge amounts of butter -- as much as they could stand.

It is interesting that in Otzi's time the necessity for a high fat diet in extreme cold conditions was understood -- or perhaps that is just how they came to live.

scotty79• 8 years ago

“The taste is really, well, it’s horrible,”

Ötzi probably liked it very much. Body of a hungry person learns to like tastes that give it the calories.

When I was starting to feed myself I was cooking rice. Forgot salt. It was dreadful. Forgot few times. Began to like the taste of overcooked unsalted rice after I satiated my hunger few times with it.

glitcher• 8 years ago

"He clearly knew that fat is a high-energy source and he really composed his diet to survive at high altitude."

Perhaps there is more evidence behind this statement left out in the article? How do we know what he "clearly knew", did his diet differ greatly from others of the same region and time period?

foobar1962• 8 years ago

How do we know what he "clearly knew"

His stomach contained a lot of fat, but little mention of meat. The animal he ate had both fat and meat (probably more meat). The fat has been stated as not tasting nice, so he mush have preferentially eaten the fat.

skookumchuck2• 8 years ago

During WW2, some british flyers went to the Soviet Union to fly for them. The first day the weather turned cold, the women brought out pots of boiling fat for them to eat. The airmen were disgusted. But after flying at high altitude in the bitter cold, they came to relish the breakfast of fat.

patient_zero• 8 years ago

That sounds like an interesting read. I couldn't find anything in my brief google search. Do you have a lead I can follow? Thanks

skookumchuck2• 8 years ago

I wish I had a source. I learned it from talking to a WW2 pilot.

bcheung• 8 years ago

Little did Ötzi know, that thousands of years from now people would be so concerned with what he ate.

In fact they even went so far as to invent social networks so people could see what others recently ate.

Ötzi’s last supper: mummified hunter's final meal revealed

Related Stories