Surprising Facts About Otzi the Iceman

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131016-otzi-ice-man-mummy-five-facts/

by Turing_Machine • 13 years ago

67 31 13 years ago

news.nationalgeographic.com

redstripe• 13 years ago

"The 40-something's list of complaints include... hardened arteries, gallstones..."

Stuff like this makes me wonder how much of current health scares about modern diets (HFCS, glutton, carbs, dairy, GMOs, bad food of the month) should be taken seriously. The narrative presented is often that our bodies aren't suited to modern diets and people used to be a lot more healthy. It's too bad we don't have more long dead guys to fill the research gap.

danmaz74• 13 years ago

Oetzi was clearly the victim of dehumanizing, evil modern technologies, like agriculture and metallurgy...

jere2• 13 years ago

Nice sarcasm, but...

he had alarming levels of arsenic in his system (probably due to working with metal ores and copper extraction)

Also, the argument here that "since he wasn't eating a modern diet and still had health problems, we can't blame health problems on our modern diet" is somewhat silly. Diets like paleo are clearly against grains, which Otzi definitely ate (for all we know, that was most of his diet [1]... this guy was alive long after the advent of agriculture).

Paleo (and similar diet) proponents would tell you that the cause of his gallstones and bad teeth were a high grain diet. To be clear, I'm not arguing that those claims are accurate, only that the logic in the OP doesn't directly counter such claims.

Furthermore, the short life expectancy argument already being trotted out in this thread is pure bull. Life expectancy, which was mainly low due to infant mortality, dropped when agriculture was introduced and didn't recover until last century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...

[1] http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/04/lessons-from-o...

baddox• 13 years ago

agriculture

He was a farmer. Agriculture was widespread in southern Europe in 3300 BC. One of his last meals included highly processed grains.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

The narrative presented is often that our bodies aren't suited to modern diets and people used to be a lot more healthy.

It's true we eat a lot of processed crap today, but if you read about a diet and see any claims that people used to be a lot more healthy you can probably ignore the rest. The paleo diet for instance, which is big nowadays, isn't based on any knowledge about what humans actually ate during the paleolithic [1]. What people forget is that the lifespan of the average human used to be much shorter, and our ancestors just had to live long enough to have offspring instead of living healthy long lives for us to be here today.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMOjVYgYaG8

throwaway2048• 13 years ago

this is something that is often misunderstood about pre-modern life expectancy. When life expectancy is calculated it includes infant mortality and child mortality, which historicly was extremely high. If you managed to live past about 10 or so in an ancient soceity your life expectancy was typically 70 or better.

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

It's that old joke all over again;

A new nuclear reactor was built near town. Not long after, residents began complaining of headaches, nausea, trouble sleeping, tiredness, and a host of other issues.

The lead engineer on the project commented with a grin: "You think that's something, just wait 'til this baby's operational!"

Mikeb85• 13 years ago

The only bad thing about modern diets is the lack of moderation and common sense. We have access to more food, and better food than ever before.

njharman• 13 years ago

My first thought (before even reading rest of sentence) on the tattoos over pain prone areas was that they were charms, spells, etc. to alleviate the pain. Not acupuncture. rubbing charcoal into lacerations is not how one does acupuncture.

alxndr• 13 years ago

That was my thought as well, especially given what we can guess about the tattoos we've found on some ancient Egyptian women. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/tattoo.htm...

KMag• 13 years ago

Rubbing charcoal into lacerations is not how one does acupuncture.

Nit: charcoal was probably rubbed into incisions, not lacerations. Tearing flesh instead of using a sharp instrument is probably too hard-core, even for Otzi.

Also, if tearing the flesh and rubbing charcoal in isn't how acupuncture is done, my aromatherapist is about to receive a VERY sternly worded email.

julienchastang• 13 years ago

A couple of decades later this story continues to fascinate me. I wonder if there is a list of scholarly journal articles that have originated from this one discovery. It has to number in the hundreds or beyond.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

Yes, there are many papers about Ötzi listed on Google Scholar.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%C3%96tzi

madaxe2• 13 years ago

Hey, I have those abnormalities. Missing M1s, and missing ribs. And I have Austrian ancestry. Damn, if only I could sequence my genome at home.

apaprocki2• 13 years ago

You can always go to ftdna.com and order the 111 Y test -- you can also talk to the project coordinator for your haplotype and for $800 or so do a walk-the-Y to sequence many kbp of your Y. The base test is much cheaper and would at least indicate if you're in the same ballpark.

madaxe2• 13 years ago

Yeah, but I've absolutely no wish to hand my DNA over to the NSA, so until I can sequence at home, it's out of the question!

shmageggy• 13 years ago

"the Iceman and those 19 share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," Parson said.

For us hackers and compsci people who are used to thinking about the rates of growth and binary trees, it shouldn't be surprising that the most recent common ancestor of all humans has been estimated to have lived less than 10k years ago. Wikipedia has a nice article on it -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor

seanmcdirmid• 13 years ago

Only "10k" years ago? You are definitely reading that wiki page wrong.

Mitochondrial Eve lived 140 to 200 kya (kya = 1,000 years ago). Y-chromosomal Adam lived perhaps 388 kya.

Edit: I guess you are looking at common ancestor, not a bottleneck. Reading the page more I find that everyone has a common ancestor around 3000 BC or so. But that common ancestor probably wouldn't be the guy frozen in the ice. But I'm betting the Sentinelese people would mess up those estimates.

jbattle• 13 years ago

How is that 10K date even possible? If the first migration to the americas happened ~16K years ago - then there were populations isolated for at least that long. Aboriginal Australians reached Australia something like 40K years ago. It's not hard for me to imagine that there is at least one Aboriginal Australian who's ancestry is ... what's the right word ... does not contain any Europeans.

This is a case where the objection to the argument presented in the article is so obvious to me I feel like I'm missing something. (wouldn't be the first time!) It almost sounds like they wrote a computer program that was seriously abstracted and when run it spit out "3000 BP" and now "they" are interpreting that result literally.

chattoraj• 13 years ago

The Wikipedia page actually agrees with you, more or less.

See the "MRCA of all living humans" section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMR...

Surprising Facts About Otzi the Iceman

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