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- Otzi, the prehistoric Ice Man who was chipped from a
glacier and put in cold storage for nine years is to be defrosted for a
few hours so that scientists can try to solve some of the mysteries which
surround him.
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- The mummified body of the 5,300-year-old Italian shepherd
was found by hikers in the Ötztaler Alps in 1991. Originally mistaken
for a modern-day mountaineer killed in a climbing accident, he was quickly
found to be the oldest and best-preserved human mummy ever discovered.
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- For years, a pact between the Italian province of Bolzano
and the government of Austria, which had been in dispute over ownership
of Ötzi, restricted invasive research into the Ice Man's internal
organs. Now relationships have thawed enough for a fresh round of academic
studies, confirmed Eduard Egarter-Vigl, a pathologist and spokesman for
the South Tyrol Archaeology Museum where Ötzi lies.
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- Ötzi's body is kept at a constant temperature of
minus six degrees Celsius in a tiny frozen cell at the museum, in the hill
town of Bolzano, in Italy. On September 25 the temperature will be raised
to plus two degrees Celsius for several hours, while separate teams of
scientists take their turn. As well as fresh tests on his organs, fragments
of Ötzi's bone and dental enamel will be removed for the first time
and put through mineralogical tests.
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- DNA specialists will be trying to build up a picture
of Ötzi's genome. Scientists hope to gain a broader understanding
of life in Europe during the Stone Age. The work is being done jointly
under the auspices of the Italian museum authorities and the scientific
advisory committee at the University of Vienna's institute of anthropology.
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- Several British academics have been involved in the scientific
tests on Ötzi's body, clothing and tools, which have established that
he was a short man in his mid-forties - elderly for the Neolithic period
- and probably a shepherd, although molecules of copper in his hair mean
that he may have been a metal prospector.
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- He wore a cunningly-stitched bearskin cap, goatskin leggings
and a waterproof woven grass cape, of a type still in use by Alpine herdsmen
in the 19th Century. His skin was decorated with tattoos and he carried
a bronze axe, fire embers and a tinder fungus impregnated with iron pyrites.
His medicine kit contained a birch fungus with antiseptic qualities that
is still in use in Siberia. He may even have practised acupuncture, judging
by puncture marks in his skin.
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- Professor Peter Vanezis, of Glasgow University's department
of forensic medicine and science, built a computer reconstruction of Ötzi's
high-cheekboned face, which showed he would not have looked out of place
in the High Street of a modern Alpine town. Now Prof Vanezis is to return
with a group of medical researchers from Verona, Italy, to try to solve
the vexed issue of how Ötzi died.
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- Ötzi's health was far from perfect. He had rheumatism
in his joints, several broken ribs, and whipworm eggs found in his intestine
suggest a parasite infection that would have caused acute stomach ache.
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