Museum Tour: Ötzi the Iceman

hi I'm so glad you made it come on in [Music] welcome to the DNA Learning Center I'm Amanda and I'm going to show you around the our human inheritance exhibit follow me we're going to start with the man of the hour let's see the Iceman this is the world's first replica of what see the Iceman one of the world's most famous mummies you might be wondering how did we know his name it's a really good question I'm asked that question very often if you look up on the wall you'll see the spelling first he was just the Iceman because this mummy was found buried in ice but then came the nicknamed Otzi because he was found in the Etzel Alps which is a range that spans from Austria down into Italy in fact if you look at the wall behind our replica of Otzi the Iceman that is the actual mountainside where this mummy was recovered so I'm going to spend some time today telling you a little bit about why this find was so important to our understanding of what life was like for people during the Neolithic which is a period of time that was pretty exciting in the history of humans when civilizations actually first started to spring up in places like the Middle East and in Europe so we're going to start at the very beginning follow me over here let's see the Iceman was found in Italy by some hikers who happened to be on vacation now in this picture the hikers we're seeing are not the hikers who found him the hikers who found him were Erica and Helmut Simon they were advanced hikers and decided to go on a path that normally hikers did not travel on and it was a very warm season the summer before and that September day in the distance they saw part of it seiz head sticking up out of a glacier what we're seeing here is more exposure of his body than Erica and Helmut actually saw they saw just the top of his head barely exposed from what I've read they went over because they thought what they saw was a piece of trash and it turned out it was actually a human head probably a big surprise I don't know what you would do if that was your find on the mountainside but I think I'd be terrified well they went and found the park rangers who confirmed that this did indeed look like the body of a human stuck in the ice and everyone was pretty sure this was probably just a poor unfortunate hiker who went missing in the mountains which apparently is quite common on this range so they proceeded to try to remove the body from the ice with drills well drilling was not a very good idea because portlets sees body was damaged I'll be showing you the damage later what they wound up having to do was try to melt the ice around his body which took several days and while they were melting the ice around his body they started to find some of his belongings things that he had with him when he died on the mountain we have replicas here in our exhibit of his belongings including his clothing and some of the things he had been carrying with him before he died these were pretty clear indicators that it was likely he was not a hiker who had gone missing a few decades prior but maybe a little more ancient that they are then they originally thought I'm going to start with his clothing so let's see shoes are a real find some of the finest shoes from this period of time that anthropologists and archaeologists have ever seen they may not look very fancy to you but they were very carefully crafted out of tree bast which is I had to look this up believe it or not the material that's under the bark of a tree somewhat stringy and it can be used to make very strong netting or roping so this is tree bass that was carefully woven together and that netting held hay all around let's ease foot in fact one of his shoes was actually still on his foot when they removed his body from the and then there was on top of this which we can't see animal hide holding everything together and along the bottom there were also strips of animal hide probably to give him traction in the snow pretty well produced shoes he had a cloak that was made of grass matting very carefully woven together we think maybe it was a cover for the rain maybe something that he could lay down on his clothing were remnants at this point made mostly of animal skins so he had leggings that covered from his ankles up to his thighs a loincloth that passed between his legs and attached to his belt a coat that was made of a few different colors of animal pelts so it was maybe high fashion for the time and then the bear fur hat most of the things he was wearing were made out of skin from animals like goats or sheep that were domesticated that humans were keeping on farms the bear fur hat though is a little bit different certainly not a domesticated bear probably a wild bear and what we think is that it might have even been a bear that he hunted himself and that having this special bear fur hat might have been an item of stature for him so right away some of the things he was wearing are telling us a little bit about this mysterious man on the mountain let's look at some of the other artifacts down here he was carrying homemade arrows he had a set of arrows only two of them were completed there were a bunch of uncompleted arrows and again a quiver made of animal pelt and there was a one strip of wood I believe it was Hazelwood that was used to build the quiver the finished arrows were made by two different people we think maybe he made one of them but the other one was probably made by someone else now how could we possibly know that it turns out that when the pieces of feather are attached to the wood there's string that's folded around the wood in a certain direction right-handed or left and it looks like one of the arrows was strong their string up here to buy the arrowhead in a right-handed direction and the other in a left-handed direction maybe someone made the arrow for him maybe he found it somewhere we may never know but a very interesting tale one of the most fantastic things that he was carrying was this X so what's so special about the ax the ax is made of a handle that comes from a yew tree and you wood is very very strong and does not secrete a lot of SAP that sticky stuff that comes out of wood when you cut it so it's a good material for a handle it's not going to get sticky but what was really impressive was the metal that was used on this axe almost a hundred percent copper this is important this tells us a little bit about when he lived so there was a period of time that you may have heard of called the Copper Age which started in the Middle East the use of copper to make tools and moved into Europe and the fact that he had a copper axe told us a little bit about maybe when the Copper Age began in Europe where he came from we'll come back to this so don't forget copper very important we think that would see the Iceman may have actually smelted this copper himself so smelting is when the metal is removed from rock you have to make it very very hot and when you do this arsenic is actually released into the air and he had high levels of arsenic in his hair that was analyzed after the body was removed from the ice and he also had arsenic in his lungs he had been breathing it so this might have been a man who was not just a hunter but was also a smelter of metal and maybe a man of stature in his community a well-rounded man of many skills he had a utility belt also made of animal skin and in the utility belt there was a more Stone Age looking tool made of Flint a little dagger that dagger was housed in a small pouch that was also made of bast and then this tool is one of my favorites because it looks like a giant crayon it's called a retoucher and this is actually made of lime wood so he used different wood for different products depending on the qualities of the wood I think that's just amazing and on the tip what looks like the point of a crayon is actually a piece of an antler now what do you think this tool could possibly be used for it was a mystery to me I had to do a little bit of research well the retoucher is used to sharpen things so that antler was probably used quite often to sharpen and resharpen that flint dagger that he was carrying around with him in fact we know that that dagger had been sharpened many times amazing now in addition to these items there are some other very interesting things over here that I'd like you to look at so these also are recreations of a few other things that it's he was carrying with him and by the way he was carrying over 60 pounds of stuff on his body after everything had been collected from the scene this was deduced by the scientists who were analyzing the find and actually not everything was found at once so some of these items were found in the very beginning in late September and early October in 1991 when the mummy was found but there was another expedition months later where several other items were collected he was carrying two containers like this made of birch bark so I don't know if you've ever seen birch trees we used to have a lot of birch trees here on Long Island but I think that they've died birch bark is what is white on the outside and flaky and it's bendy so you can make it into different shapes and birch trees also can be used to make material like glue so these birch bark containers were carefully sewn and glued together and they were used to carry things one of the birch bark containers was completely intact I think the other one accidentally was stepped on when the scene was being collected in one of the birch bark containers there were pieces of charcoal maybe not even charcoal my apologies burnt pieces of wood they were maple leaves that looked like they had been burned and there was a fungus called tinder fungus tinder fungus can actually be used as a fire starter and there were little flecks of iron pyrite in the tinder fungus which probably helped to light it so what we think is that let's see was carrying around the tinder fungus inside his birch bark container and it carried a glow and it made it much easier for him to start fires very quickly as he was traveling around the mountains fantastic the maple leaves were probably used to insulate the container and then in the other birch bark container he had some other tools and something kind of like a first aid kit believe it or not there was a second fungus called a poly poor fungus that actually has medicinal properties so here's another clue maybe he was a medicine man or a shaman in his community he was carrying a fungus that had antibiotic properties that had styptic properties which means it can stop bleeding and it can also be used to relieve intestinal discomfort which would have come in handy because it turns out this ice man had a pretty nasty case of whipworm hmm he had this tool here which is a stone disc made of a special kind of marble with tree bass strings coming off and feathers what we think is that maybe that was attached to his belt and was used to carry small prey that he had caught maybe small birds or rabbits they were tied to the strings and then in addition some extra antler pieces and some more homemade bast threading and animal hides used to attach things to his utility belt amazing so I'm sure you're all wondering based on the things he was carrying with him how old is this man do we think he was a hiker I don't think that a hiker 60 years ago would have been carrying around a copper axe so everyone knew after his find that he was probably much older now I don't know what you would guess I'd probably guess maybe he a few hundred years old well let's go back to the mummy take a look it looks pretty old a technique called carbon dating was used shortly after he was taken to Austria for his first set of analysis and carbon dating revealed are you ready that he was five thousand three hundred years old Wow he lived several hundred years before Stonehenge was built a few hundred years before there were any big Egyptian pyramids built he's old so how did his body remain in such good condition well you may not think it's good condition but think about it usually when someone dies what happens to the soft parts of the body like the skin and the muscle and the organs they decompose there are microorganisms that will come along and break down all of those soft tissues and what would we expect to find 5,000 years later if we're lucky maybe some bones but his whole body was completely preserved so what was different about his body than most average people well it wasn't what was different about his body it's where his body was so don't forget he was found on a mountain over 10,000 feet up in the air above sea level I don't know if you've ever been on the top of a mountain but it could be very cold there's dry wind blowing around and what scientists think is that within a short period of time after he died he was probably covered by a layer of snow and his tissues started to freeze quite fast all the microorganisms that probably would have started to decompose the body died too and then over a period of time that very cold dry wind wikked the moisture out of his tissues all of the water was pulled out and his body pretty much in essence was freeze-dried he looks a little freeze-dried but what we can see is his skin still surrounding his body and it's not just his skin that's still there inside the skin are all of his organs the whole digestive system the brain the heart so we have a whole human body and from that body there are all kinds of interesting things we can learn now I do want to show you the damage so if you come around this side you'll see there's a large part of his backside missing so let's see did not live with only half a backside this is what happened when researchers tried to remove him with pneumatic drills his body was quite delicate and they lost a piece I was actually asked recently what did they do with the piece that was removed I have no idea I would imagine that it travelled to Austria with the rest of his body and maybe it was helpful in some of the analysis because they had some tissue that had already been removed from his body but what this damage did was it exposed some of his internal organs now how did this replica get made I'm sure already you're thinking this looks very realistic the real mummy is in Italy if you wanted to see let's see the Iceman you would have to go to a small town called bolzano italy and there's a museum there just for him called the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology they keep the mummy in an ice compartment you can see him through a porthole and every once in a while they have to spray water over his body to keep his tissues in that kind of permanently frozen State our replicas though has all the details that you'd be able to see on the real let's see the Iceman if you were able to take a closer look including the damage to his body and some other very interesting things but what I'd like to do is show you how the mummy was made we consigned an artist who specializes in making ancient recreations to make the model for us and he relied on a company in Belgium called materialise which does 3d printing I've never done 3d printing myself but I know a lot of kids who have done 3d printing at school or who have 3d printers at home but imagine the size the 3d printer has to be to make something this big well it turns out in Belgium materialised has one of the world's largest 3d printers now in order to do the 3d printing we first needed access to cat-scans of let's seize body who had those well our friends at the Museum in Bolzano provided those cat scans for us and with cat scans and modern technology like 3d printing we were able to get everything we needed to our artist Gary stop so that he could build this replica for us and believe it or not he's made three of these this is the first the second was given to the museum of South Tyrol so that they can use it for a traveling exhibit and the third is safe in a box waiting to be put on exhibit at a DNA Learning Center that will be opening in Brooklyn in the near future but come this way I have a clip here that shows how the model was built so here we are in the beautiful town of bolzano italy it's the very northern tip of Italy and there he is the real let's see the Iceman you'll see everyone's wearing sterile gowns and gloves and masks no one wants to contaminate the mummy with their own bacteria for fear that those bacteria could decompose his tissues and you saw them spring water over his body to keep that kind of layer of permafrost and maintain his tissues frozen these are pictures of the cat scans that were lent to us from the south tyrol Museum of Archaeology and they were sent to materialise in Belgium so here is a 3d rendering that's exactly what's going to come out of the 3d printer now this is a very long process this doesn't happen in an hour but what we're going to see is him rising up out of the printer from a liquid bed of resin amazing did you notice he's missing his hands it turns out look no hands when the cat scans were produced his hands didn't fit in the tube that they were trying to slide him through to get the scans so one of the tasks that our artist was faced with was to create the hands from scratch what you're seeing him doing now is taking the resin 3d printed version which is kind of like a clear plastic and texturising it his goal ultimately is going to be to make a cast and a cast is like a mold and the important thing about a cast or a mold is that once you've produced an accurate cast or mold you can make as many replicas as you want so once the head was fastened back on and texturized and he had the hands completed they started the very long process of creating the cast which you see before you now many layers are applied and then fibreglass is placed on top and then painted again once the cast was complete gary was able to make the final version out of another resin material and other mixed-media so what we're seeing him doing now is decorating he's painting and designing texturising doing all of the things that he needed to do to make this model look as realistic as possible there he is working on the wounded area which was one of the most difficult parts to recreate and he had to make it sturdy enough to be upright because we knew we wanted our visitors to be able to see him from every angle so there's a pole up through his body one interesting fact that not a lot of people know is that Gary actually placed one of his own eyelashes on our replica you're probably not going to be able to see it but let's go take a look let's he had an eyelash still attached to his right eye so it's on our left and Gary to make this as realistic as possible placed one of his own on the model so there's a piece of the artist one thing a lot of people want to know is why he's in this weird position almost like he's dabbing well we're you know that when he died he probably fell face-first and we'll talk about his cause of death in a minute we also know that at some point after his death the glacier that he was buried under actually moved and it moved him as well and that's why he wound up in that odd position it's why his ears look kind of flat on the edges and his lip and his nose are kind of mushed but I think he looks pretty good for someone who's over 5,000 years old so what else can we learn about him just from looking at his body I don't know if you've had a chance to look at his hands most of his fingernails had fallen out I think there was one still attached fingernails can actually tell us a lot about someone so it turns out that a few of his fingernails had ridges on them now my fingernails have ridges vertical ridges that go up and down but some of his nails actually were found around his body and they had sideways or horizontal ridges on them those indicate that his fingernails stopped growing for periods of time and that usually happens during periods of great stress or sickness so we know that they're based on these lines that there were at least three times over the last year of his life that he was under great stress or not well we do know he had a case of whipworm because whipworm eggs were found inside him maybe it was that but we know that he had some other ailments as well we'll get to them in a minute what about what else about his body could we look at to identify or learn anything more about him his teeth are pretty interesting I don't know if you'd had a look at his teeth I don't think he brushed his teeth they look pretty flat also why do you think his teeth would be so flat I think it had to do with his diet we know that in his diet there was a lot of stone ground wheat and we'll talk about how we know that in a moment but that probably did a lot of damage to his teeth by the way how old was he when he died and how would we ever figure that out so we know he was buried under the ice for 5,300 years but what was his age well it turns out you can actually figure out someone's age by looking closely at their bones so his body actually told us by looking at special bone cells that he was almost 46 years of age when he died that very old doesn't sound so old to me anymore it's not that old but think about when he lived over 5000 years ago that was pretty old so we've got a pretty old gentleman up in the mountains carrying 60 pounds worth of stuff that's pretty much half his body weight maybe even more we think maybe he was a shaman or someone of stature in his community why was he up on the mountain there are theories that maybe he was on the run we'll talk about those theories in a bit let's go back to his body another really really cool thing on his body is his tattoos come around the backside they're easier to see yes he has lots of tattoos his tattoos are not like the tattoos people get today you watched ink master or anything like that look closely by his spine there's a big patch of them that are easy to see their lines most of his tattoos or little groupings of lines or their Criss crosses there's a good crisscross down on his knee which is visible he had over 60 tattoos each line counts as a tattoo so there's a large grouping of them along his spine another grouping by his hip on his backside his knee along his calves ankles wrists ribs I'll be honest I've never been able to find every tattoo but they are all here why would he have all these tattoos and how did they even make tattoos back then well to make the tattoo all they had to do was make an opening in the skin and rub charcoal on water in the opening and that's why they all have that kind of blackish purple color and the placement of the tattoos is an indicator or a clue as to why he might have the tattoos there are all on places where there are joints or movement or flex points and a lot of these placements correspond actually to acupuncture points that acupuncture is still used today so acupuncture is the treatment of pressure points to relieve pain so it's been speculated that his tattoos might have been used like a very early form of acupuncture to relieve pain on these flex points or joints why would he have pain in his joints well he did have a lot of wear in his joints so he was 46 years old which was quite old he probably lived a very hard life moving around in the mountains it would make sense for him to have wear in his joints and there's another reason why he might have had pain in his joints turns out the bacteria that cause Lyme disease were found inside him so there was extensive analysis of his microbiome all of the bacteria that he carried around before he died and Lyme disease bacteria were found and also the bacteria that caused peptic ulcers ulcers of the stomach were found in his stomach h pylori so he actually had some bacterial diseases that people today still have in fact i think he's the oldest known documented case of a human with lyme disease he also had some bacteria that we all have today in our mouth so we looked at his teeth he had gum disease gingivitis he had those bacteria too in addition to looking at the bacteria inside him though there's been extensive analysis of his DNA because his tissues were so well preserved scientists have been able to isolate his whole genome all the DNA from his cells and compare his genes his DNA to the DNA we have today and we know a few interesting things about him from looking at his DNA we have confirmed that he probably had brown hair and brown eyes his hair was found at the scene but it had fallen out we confirmed that he had o Type O blood which is still very common today we confirmed that he was lactose intolerant which actually is not a surprise because to this day about 65% of all humans are lactose intolerant a very common trait we also know that he had heart disease and we know that in two ways so I'm going to come around here we can't see his heart but analysis of his heart showed hardening of his arteries there was fat deposits around his heart that's a sign of coronary heart disease and he also had a variation in his DNA that's associated with that disease in humans today so you might be wondering I know I have someone in my family with heart disease and one of the main things the doctor says is this is caused by your diet you need to remove fat high-fat foods from your diet was his diet like the Western diet we eat today full of fatty foods McDonald's things like that do we even know what his diet was I'm pretty sure it wasn't McDonald's we do know what he was eating though because don't forget his whole digestive system was still there completely freeze-dried and all the meals he before he died were also inside him are you wondering what he was eating I can tell you follow me so analysis of the contents of his digestive system have revealed that he ate several meals over the last 36 hours of his life so those meals traveled through his digestive system and when he died they stopped moving so if a meal was found at the very bottom of the digestive system and the large intestine that's something he probably ate 36 hours ago or a little bit after and then as we move up through the digestive system through the small intestines and then to the stomach those are more recent meals so we can figure out not only what he ate but about when he ate those things amazing so it looks like approximately 14 to 55 hours before he died which is a big span but the movement of food through that bottom part of the digestive system varies and can also be affected by things like stress it can slow things down what did he eat well looks like in that milk meal he was eating I bet so you know what that is it's like a mountain goat he was eating some ibex meat meal too which was a little bit later he ate some legumes so it was more plant-based this meal and he ate some Primrose and some pollen hmm the pollen ei is king Cup pollen which does have some medicinal properties and people today still purchase and consume King Cup pollen he also ate Red Deer a little bit later on some leafy greens sounds pretty healthy to me his last meal was ibex again some berries and herbs so overall it looks like a pretty healthy diet I will point out that the meal that was found in his stomach was a pretty big meal so probably an hour or two before he died he sat down and had a big meal so there's a theory that maybe he was in the mountains on the run being chased if you were being chased through the mountains would you sit down and eat a two-pound meal I don't know that I would so finding that food in his stomach was a game-changer it made scientists think that maybe his story was different than they had originally expected I'm gonna get back to the DNA though because there's two other interesting DNA stories to tell and I can tell you them right here so we know about the bacteria that were inside him we know about his heart disease we know about his lactose intolerance but there were two different DNA types analyzed that are often used by scientists to trace ancestry ones called mitochondrial DNA and one is called y chromosome DNA mitochondrial DNA is inherited maternally so it's passed from mother to child and if that child is a daughter she'll pass it on as well it stays intact and it's as it's passed from one generation to the next so as a result it's very useful in tracing lineages so his mitochondrial DNA was typed and the mitochondrial DNA type he has is still present in Europe what I've read is about 10% of people in Europe share what we call his k mitochondrial haplotype but his subtype of K is very very rare hmm he also had a specific Y chromosome haplotype and the Y chromosome is special because it's passed from father to son the whole chromosome all at once so again because it's passed from father to son and it's not mixing with mom's DNA it's used to trace lineages and his Y chromosome DNA still exists in Italy his type but believe it or not it exists on a couple of islands off the coast of Italy so there's a map here that shows these two little islands Corsica and Sardinia why would there only be people here who have that same Y chromosome DNA as let's see well it turns out that there have been movements of people from the Middle East into places like Europe so this is Italy here it looks like about so we know that about 8,000 years ago there were people farming in the Middle East and those farmers started to move from the Middle East and populate parts of Europe and you can see that here okay so farming we think started here and farmers started to migrate to other parts of the world so what C represents probably these people who were migrating in and we're settling in parts of Europe and farming we know that after these settlements began less than 5,000 years ago there was another influx of people into this part of the world and that probably when that happened there they were invaders there were Wars probably a lot of people died as these invaders were coming in from the east my guess in fact scientists have speculated this is that people migrated from the mainland in Italy where people tease people were and they went out to the islands it's geographically isolated it's safe so his Y chromosome haplotype was preserved on those Islands by the people who probably fled and found solace on those islands it's an amazing story all told by his DNA and the DNA of others in databases that we can compare him to so I know that you're all wondering is that the burning question why was he on the mountain and how did he die well I'll tell you for about 10 years no one knew how he died there was something overlooked come this way I'll show you about ten years after he was found people were scanning cat scans and x-rays and they found an arrowhead lodged inside his chest it hadn't been identified until now and then when they looked at the mummy there was a tiny little scar where this arrow had it entered what we think is that he was shot from you can see the opening in his skin between his shoulder blade and his shoulder bones up there tiny tiny little wound he had many wounds many fresh wounds some on his hands it was clear that he had been in some kind of combat situation at least within the last few days of his dying but this wound was somewhat overlooked it looks insignificant but what we know now is that someone a sharp shooter shot him from behind the arrow had entered through that little opening and hit a subclavian artery a major artery and probably within five minutes he bled to death he has a wound on his head that could be from being bludgeoned also or it could be from him falling forward and bumming his head on a rock we're not sure but it looks like the cause of death is an arrow interestingly the shaft of the arrow that entered his shoulder wasn't found anywhere in the area maybe he tried to pick it up and or he tried to remove it and it snapped off and it got lost at the scene maybe the person who shot him removed it to remove any evidence that they were involved in his killing why would they shoot him we don't know so this murder mystery is still unsolved when I have groups of children in here I hear lots of interesting theories so one theory I've heard pretty common is that maybe it was a big snowstorm and he was sitting down to eat and he had on his bare fur hat and from the distance he looked like an animal and it was an accident possible yeah maybe because this was during a period of time where civilizations were starting to pop up and maybe people were starting to draw invisible boundary lines he somehow wound up over one of those boundary lines on someone else's property and he was shot we may never know but it's amazing all the things we actually do know just from his mummified remains and from his belongings so come on over here the last thing I want to show you is this picture here so this was a lent to us the photograph from the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology so they consigned some artists to make a model of what they thought let's see may have looked like before he died and a lot of students who come here like to stand next to him so it turns out this shows him at a height of five feet two inches I'm gonna stand next to him I've got my shoes on I'm five five he was probably a little taller than this in his adult life we think his body might have shrunken after he died but he's wearing some of his clothing here I suspect most of the time in the snowy mountains he had more clothing up here but I think this is to show his physique we know he was in very good shape very little subcutaneous fat on his body and we do know that he had long hair because as I mentioned his hair was found around him now you're invited to come back and join us again tomorrow for another let see experience now that you know all of these interesting things about his life and his times maybe you want to know a little bit more well we have a lab where you can actually reenact one of the fun analyses that was done to figure out where he was over the last three days of his life forensic scientists have been able to use pollen found throughout his digestive system to figure out where he was strange right you'll learn all about how pollen can be used to identify geographic location and this interesting information helps us learn a little bit more maybe about why he was in the mountains before he died well I hope that you enjoyed our tour and if you have any questions feel free to ask them in the chat or check out our website we have an exhibit website and I'm sure that you can email us also if you have any questions thanks for coming it was a pleasure to see you again

Channel: DNA Learning Center

Views: 614,940

Rating: 4.8598785 out of 5

Keywords: Otzi, Iceman, mummy, neolithic, museum, Ötztal Alps, South Tyrol, DNALC Live, Amanda McBrien, DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Id: w1KgN4kLP7o

Length: 41min 52sec (2512 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020