'Iceman' Discovery Wasn't a Freak Event. More Frozen Mummies May Await (science.org) 36
In 2001 Slashdot ran a story about a 5,100-year-old "ice mummy" discovered in the Alps. But now researchers are arguing that our assumptions about how weather, climate, and glacial ice conspired to preserve it were all wrong. Science magazine reports:
In 1991, hikers in the Alps came across a sensational find: a human body, partially encased in ice, at the top of a mountain pass between Italy and Austria. Police called to the scene initially assumed the man had died in a mountaineering accident, but within weeks archaeologists were arguing he was actually the victim of a 5100-year-old murder.
They were right: Later dubbed Ötzi after the Ötztal Valley nearby, the man's body is the oldest known "ice mummy" on record.... But Ötzi's preservation may not be as unusual as it first seemed, archaeologists argue in a paper published today. And that could mean more bodies from the distant past are waiting to emerge as ice melts in a warming climate.
Ötzi "was such a huge surprise when he was found people thought he was a freak event," says Lars Pilø, an archaeologist working for the Oppland County Glacier Archaeological Program in Norway. But many of the original assumptions about how weather, climate, and glacial ice conspired to preserve him were wrong, Pilø; and other researchers write in the journal The Holocene. "This paper sheds new light on the interpretation of this exceptional archaeological find," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich, who was not part of the team....
"The general understanding was that Ötzi marked this beginning of a cooler period," Huss says, "as people were sure that [he] must have been within the ice without interruption since his death." But with the retreat of glaciers and ice patches around the world over the past few decades, other ancient remains have emerged, including bodies, hunting equipment, horse manure, and skis. "No one expected similar sites," says Thomas Reitmaier, an archaeologist at the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland and a co-author of the new study. "Now, we have lots, and we find this one fits quite well with the picture of glacial archaeology we've developed."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story.
They were right: Later dubbed Ötzi after the Ötztal Valley nearby, the man's body is the oldest known "ice mummy" on record.... But Ötzi's preservation may not be as unusual as it first seemed, archaeologists argue in a paper published today. And that could mean more bodies from the distant past are waiting to emerge as ice melts in a warming climate.
Ötzi "was such a huge surprise when he was found people thought he was a freak event," says Lars Pilø, an archaeologist working for the Oppland County Glacier Archaeological Program in Norway. But many of the original assumptions about how weather, climate, and glacial ice conspired to preserve him were wrong, Pilø; and other researchers write in the journal The Holocene. "This paper sheds new light on the interpretation of this exceptional archaeological find," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zürich, who was not part of the team....
"The general understanding was that Ötzi marked this beginning of a cooler period," Huss says, "as people were sure that [he] must have been within the ice without interruption since his death." But with the retreat of glaciers and ice patches around the world over the past few decades, other ancient remains have emerged, including bodies, hunting equipment, horse manure, and skis. "No one expected similar sites," says Thomas Reitmaier, an archaeologist at the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland and a co-author of the new study. "Now, we have lots, and we find this one fits quite well with the picture of glacial archaeology we've developed."
Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the story.
here it be (Score:5, Informative)
The summary leaves out the most important parts. This quote from the paper:
it is likely that Ötzi was not permanently buried in ice immediately after his death, but that the gully where he lay was repeatedly exposed over the next 1500years...Based on the available evidence, this ice is better understood as a non-moving, stationary field of snow and ice, frozen to the bedrock.
Re: here it be (Score:3)
Well I'm afraid. I've been afraid since the savannah in North Africa dried up, resulting in the Sahara desert. About 2000 years BCE.
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Why do you regard that as a "most important" part?
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Because it's the novel part. It's what they learned.
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Hmm... Yes, novel, but important? I'm guessing that they were able to detect that some of the deterioration of the corpse happened at separated times. But I'm still not seeing the significance, though it is obvious that the condition of the remains was becoming worse each time they were unfrozen.
However in terms of discovering similar remains, it seems they should make (systematic) efforts to find (as quickly as possible) any caves or crevices that are being exposed by retreating glaciers.
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Because previously they thought the poor guy had been buried immediately by an advancing glacier, and remained buried until now. It turns out, upon further research, that it wasn't that kind of glacier.
With glaciers that advance, the body will be carried buried in the ice, and be uncovered at the terminus.
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Hmm... (Again.) Yes, I know that the most frequent case for glacial deposition works that way, but I thought that mechanism almost always insured that the body (or whatever it was that was entrapped in the glacier) will be in terrible condition at the end? Was this body ever moved by the glacier? I might be confusing it with another case?
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This body was not moved by a glacier. They thought it was the kind of glacier that moves, but through the research presented here, they determined that it was not the kind of glacier that moves.
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Yes, and so?
So I branched all the way back to your original comment, and my question in reply still seems unanswered.
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I have no idea why you are confused. You need to explain yourself more clearly. With fewer words.
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You first, as the joke goes? Really, you did start this discussion. (If it was an FP, then I should thank you for your good intentions?) But you focused on a new bit of data, which is well and good, and yet I'm still unclear why you think it's significant.
Then again, my interpretation of this story is that a "science writer" was grasping for clicks, and then Slashdot was grasping for clicks by telling us about that. "Man fell into crevice, body discovered much later" doesn't sound like much of a story, and
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I don't know why "learning new things" is not the same as important to you.
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I think I like learning new things more than the average bear, as that joke goes, but not all new things are created equal, and I'm actually skeptical there is a new thing in this case. Dare I say we already knew the weather is like that?
Kind of like manufactured outrage? In this case manufactured newness to justify publishing a "big story" about a minor detail? But even the minor research reports are frequently seized upon by people with axes to grind. (Now it's moving into mountain from molehill territory
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Dare I say we already knew the weather is like that?
You'd be going against science if you did, or at least against the paper. So don't dare unless you have a good reason.
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Now I've confused myself, apparently because of the negative implication of "dare"? Dare I say "don't dare"?
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I don't know, maybe we just have different ideas of what "important" means. Which is reasonable.
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Writing something like that give away that your experience of snow and ice in the mountains has been mediated by TV screens or skis. As a physics professor once put it "not even wrong".
The discoverers and excavators (including in the first few days "Everest-oxygenless" and Achttausender pioneer, Reinhold Messner, who certainly knows how glaciers behave) knew the body was in a hollow in the bedrock. They also kne
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blah blah blah [citation needed]. Your post is garbage.
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Not only the Alps (Score:5, Interesting)
In Scandinavia there are so many finds that archeologists set up a hotline where hikers can call when they encounter something interesting that's melted out of the glaciers. Andean archeologists are finding remnants of trade routes from before the founding of civilization.
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If there are trade routes, doesn't that imply there is civilization?
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"If there are trade routes, doesn't that imply there is civilization?"
It implies there WAS civilization. I'll leave it to Eric Idle to sum up what that implication means from The Galaxy Song:
"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!"
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Hunter/gatherer peoples (the few that still exist today) trade with each other all the time. There was never a civilization in the deep Kalahari but Bushmen exchanged goods with each other on those occasions when they met, foods from the south not available in the north or feathers available in the north but not in the south. The same with Inuit peoples, Amazonian tribesmen, New Guinea hill peoples, the American horse tribes, everyone.
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Not at all, obsidian for instance was widely traded at least as far back as 50,000 BPE, 400 centuries before the founding of Ur. Broken spear points carved in the local style from almost that far back have been found on Crete, knapped from lumps of obsidian originating in a volcanic crater in mid-Anatolia. (Crete, BTW, could only be reached by boat.) Flakes of the same material have been found in eastern Iraq. Obsidian from the eastern slopes of the Andes is found in some of the earliest seasonal coasta
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But back in 19th century, read Tom Sawyer to get a glimpse of active trade that was going on among the school children.
A bug in a match box to release in the class was mentioned, along with a piece of blue bottle to look through.
Even a dead cat had uses, to cure warts. Some incantation that will make the cat follow the devil and the wart follow the cat.
Re: Not only the Alps (Score:1)
To many, civilization started when Twitter came online, and now that it has become someone elseâ(TM)s toy, the end of the world is nigh.
Many people believe things wrong about hunter-gatherer societies, because research has greatly advanced since the public school books were written. We now know of permanent settlements and trading posts during that period, we know that most pursued a capitalist type trade system with neighboring tribes, because they had already learned that war and isolationism is extr
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When the word "barbarian" came into existence, it referred to most Europeans.
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Civilisation means city-dwelling. There have been plenty of non-European civilisations.
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How long is your piece of string?
Yes, it does imply that there was something resembling civilisation somewhere, but not necessarily anywhere near the bit of the trade route that you've found.
It also indicates that there was civilisation before there was pottery. Huh??
You know GÃbekli Tepe [wikipedia.org]? Major, complex construction site. Firmly placed by the archaeologist in the PPN ("Pre-Pottery Neolithic"). And the area's archaeology has strong evidence of trade in locall
Some irony... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am just a cave man (Score:2)
unfrozen and brought back to life by your scientists.
Your world frightens and confuses me.
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Steve Rogers could not be reached for comment (Score:2)
But then again, he wasn't really an ice mummy, was he?