Remember The Iceman with respect, honor and envy

For years now, I’ve been following the
story of The Iceman, a 5,300-year-old
mummified corpse found frozen in the
Austrian Alps in 1991. Have you heard
of this gentleman? Ötzi — as he’s been
dubbed — has been the subject of several
documentaries because he reveals so much
to us about the Neolithic. Scientists
from Europe, America and Australia have
been using the most advanced of our modern
technologies to probe into every corner
of this primitive man’s remains to find
out just what his story was. How did he
live? How did he die? How much better are
we than him?

I used to joke in columns that Ötzi
wasn’t miraculously still alive when
he was thawed out. That isn’t entirely
true, though. His heart wasn’t beating
and his brain wasn’t firing off
synaptically, but old Ötzi was telling
quite a story.

The food in his colon indicated that he
ate primitive bread, preserved bear meat
and cultivated plants. Ötzi’s fingernails
had stopped growing several times in the
six months prior to his ultimate demise.
This told us that he had been near death
and recovered with the help of medicinal
herbs.

He had tattoos indicating he had undergone
acupuncture treatments. He carried a copper
axe and wore mocassins tied to snowshoes,
the first of their kind.

Anthropologists are constantly gob-smacked
by Ötzi because he keeps proving that our
so-called primitive ancestors were on-the-ball,
well-equipped, socially, technologically,
artistically and medically advanced men
and not just slightly improved upon animals
on the way to becoming the glory that is
modern man.

In fact, the more we learn about Ötzi, the
better he looks and the more primitive we
appear.

Before Ötzi, anthropologists thought people
in the Neolithic were running around like a
bunch of monkeys with some skins thrown over
them tied roughly together with twigs and
grasses. Not so. Bearskins were tailored for
Ötzi — he even had a hat — and a cape made
of woven grasses kept him dry.

Copper, they believed, hadn’t even been figured
out yet, but Ötzi had an axe made of the
material. This means he was the proud owner
of a fairly common tool and not a rare item
kept only for ceremonial purposes.

Ötzi carried everything he needs to start a
fire in the snow. I don’t know about you, but
while I think I know how to start a fire, I’ve
never actually done it with anything less
primitive than matches, rolled up newspapers
and lighter fluid soaked briquettes. Let’s be
honest, there are a lot of basic skills and
knowledge about the world that each of us lacks
today because it just isn’t needed in our daily
repertoires.

Ötzi was 45 and quite old by Neolithic
standards. It was originally thought he’d died
of a combination of old age and exposure to the
elements. I think that was wishful thinking on
the part of modern scientists who wanted this
primitive to look like something of a helpless
tool at the mercy of the natural world when all
was said and done.

But it turns out that Ötzi lived in harmony with
his world and died from an arrow wound he got
from one of his fellow humans. He received the
wound several days prior to his death, too. Imagine
that if you will. The will and determination this
man had. How capable he was. He was a model of
self-sufficiency capable of living almost
indefinitely in the wilderness on food he killed
and in shelter he provided for himself. Even
after several illnesses failed to kill him off,
he managed to go on for days after being
shot, for what reason, we can’t know.

Maybe Ötzi was attacked. Maybe Ötzi started
something he couldn’t finish. It doesn’t
matter ultimately. What does matter is
that when we look back across our history,
we see names and dates and places of
significance. We revere men and women
whose actions changed the course of
human events and we marvel.

Yet 5,300 years ago, a primitive man — at
least in the sense that he came before us —
whose real name we will never know, whose
life is a mystery to us, died without fanfare
or record. Because a hiker stumbled upon him,
Ötzi came back to life with a message no
scientist has discovered or approved, but
which will one day be undeniable to all. We
may be modern, but we are not better, and
certainly no more capable, than our ancestors.

In October, 2004, Helmut Simon, the German
hiker who discovered Ötzi, died in the same
mountain range where he found The Iceman.
Simon fell 100 meters from an unmarked path
to his instant death on a peak called
Gaiskarkogel south of Salzburg, Austria,
home to some of mankind’s greatest artistic
achievements. He will no doubt be remembered
fondly by friends and family for some years,
but to history, he will be lucky to be a
minor footnote in the story of Ötzi who
never wrote an opera or wore a Gortex coat,
but neither did he slip and fall to his death.