Ötzi the Iceman Discovered - Sept. 19, 1991

Hikers discovered Ötzi the Iceman on this day in 1991. There's more in the January 4, 2012 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff you
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's September nineteenth.

(00:22):
Let's see. The ice Man was discovered on this day
in Two German hikers found him. Their names were Erica
and Helmet Simon. They were hiking in the Alps near
the border of Austria and Italy, and they walked past
this gully that was full of mostly melted snow. They
saw something there that they thought was trash, but when

(00:44):
they look a little closer, they realized it was a body.
They took a picture and they went to report it
to the authorities because they thought this was somebody who
was recently deceased, somebody who had been murdered or had
accidentally died getting lost in the mountains. Not longer go.
Authorities came the next day to try to drill the
remains out of the ice because his upper body was exposed,

(01:07):
but his lower body was just encased and because everybody
thought this was a recent victim of some kind of
accident or violence. There weren't any archaeologists in the scene,
and the attempts to remove the body were pretty rushed
because of this incoming bad weather, so along the way
they inadvertently damaged it, not realizing that what they were

(01:28):
looking at was an archaeological find and not a recent
murder victim. They did start to get some clues that
maybe this body was really old. There was an axe
nearby that was removed from the scene and was definitely
not a modern tool. And also as they started to
get more of a look at his clothing and the
material around him, it seemed odd and out of place

(01:50):
in the modern world. The body was finally recovered on
September twenty three, along with pieces of string and hide
and leather and other materials. While there was no archaeological
oversight to the removal, it was filmed by the Innsbruck
University Institute of Forensic Medicine. The body and the acts
and the recovered materials were all sent for analysis, but

(02:14):
they were still all thinking that this was a hiker
hiker who had died really recently. Finally, Conrad Spindler of
Innsbruck University was called in to examine the body on
September and he said he was sure it was at
least four thousand years old. It's also led to some
discussion about which nation should be responsible for this body

(02:35):
because it was found so close to the border between
Austria and Italy, and eventually it was decided it should
remain at Innsbruck and July in August of two there
was further archaeological research in the area where the body
had been found, and more materials brought back from that.
It was ultimately determined that this man nicknamed Hutsie, it

(02:56):
was about five thousand, three hundred years old, and we
have learned so much about him and about the world
from five thousand years ago since this discovery. Lets He
had sixty one tattoos, which are made from rubbing charcoal
into incisions that were made in his skin. It was
probably around forty five when he died. He had some

(03:18):
horizontal grooves also known as Bow's lines on the one
recovered fingernail that they found, which suggests that he experienced
some great physical stress at several points in his life.
His last meal concluded dried goat meat that for some
reason was widely reported as bacon. He had plaques in
his arteries that suggests some cardiovascular disease, and his DNA

(03:41):
contains the world's oldest evidence of lime disease, probably lets
he has relatives still living today. Researchers have gone back
and forth over Utsi's cause of death as they've done
more and more research on his remains. The earlier hypothesis
is that he was murdered, but more recent research suggests
that the wounds on his body that led to the

(04:04):
conclusion that he was murdered probably would not have been fatal.
He may have just frozen to death. You can learn
more about Utsy in the January fourth episode of Stuff
You Missed in History Class called Utsy Everyone's Favorite copper
age Man, along with almost every episode in the Unearthed
series of episodes of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

(04:26):
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and you can tune in tomorrow for a battle that
was famous but not violent.