Hey everyone, it's Josh, your old pal, and for this week's select I've chosen our episode on Utsi the Iceman, from November of twenty nineteen. Utsi was discovered high in the Alps by hikers in nineteen ninety one, and since then he has become perhaps the world's most closely studied corpse. He's not only fascinating because of the information he's brought us about everyday life in the copper Age, where he hails from. He's also fascinating because of what he demonstrates
researchers are able to do in the present today. They've gone so far as to recreate his last couple of days on Earth. That's how MAC researchers are today. Hope you enjoy this episode because it's a great one.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and there's guest producer Josh over there, which makes us if you should know all and.
Guest uh ghost host Chuck?
Are you a ghost now? Did you die? Now?
I just thought if there was two josh is in here, I feel a little left out.
Oh I see and ganged up on.
Yeah, I just I had no clever way to say it.
Ghost host, You're right about that.
My mouth is working today, my brain.
That's all right. It's been a long week already. It's only Tuesday, really right? Yeah?
Is it just me?
No, it's been a long week.
I mean today's like I know, I don't want to complain. Never mind, everything's great. Hey, let me ask you something. Does otsy have an um loud or not?
Yes, it's it'sy okay, rhymes with tutsy. I saw someone put it. I think are good friends at Smithsonian Magazine.
Yeah, it's ittsy. There's a bit of an R in there.
Yeah, I like ittsy all right, like Tutsy Rollsy the Dead Mummy. It'sy.
This is a good one. This is exciting. I've been wanting to do one on this one too.
I had too. But in what spurned? Spurned or spurn is where you say get away and spurs like go ahead, okay, nice, Yeah that makes sense because you're using your spurs spurred.
Sure, I'm sure that's where that comes from.
Surely. Okay, Wow, Chuck just blew my mind? Uh what spurred this was there? Let's see you made some news recently because they managed to trace his last like day and a half.
Yeah, really like in the past few days even.
Yeah, and about fifty three hundred years ago. He had the same thoughts that we had when we started this podcast. He's like, it's only Tuesday, and this has been a long week already, a long, deadly, bloody week.
Yeah. I've been interested in this since I saw the facial reconstruction photos. I was like, or's he was Jack Palance?
Chris Christophferson?
Is that?
Oh?
Okay, dude, A little bit of both.
No, it's like they said, mister Christophferson, please come in so we can.
Well, now that I think about it, Christofferson and Jack Palance are have some similarities. If you put a beard on Jack Palance, yeah, sure, squinty eyes, yeah, I guess, soundish face, Yeah, I guess I could see both. Christofferson, Man, what a legend.
Remember, Yeah, look there's Chris Christofferson kidding, that's it'sy.
Yeah, I mean it's me and Bobby McGee right there.
Exactly Did you see that Ken Burns documentary?
No? I didn't, not yet, you haven't yet. Still No, I went to buy it the other day and I just have not yet.
So good.
You got to buy that stuff, right, yeah, all right. I just didn't know if there was a work around. And you're like, oh, no, dude, here's what you do. I mean, I'll buy it. It's like sixty bucks.
Oh wow, PBS gives it away for free.
What do you got some PBS connection?
No, it was on PBS for a while.
Oh do you have cable or something? See, I don't have I don't.
Even think you have to have cable. Oh you mean like like you just stream? Yes, you're you're up the creek.
Yeah. I thought you meant no, you don't have to have cable to get PBS. You just like they help people in the world and exactly just beams under your eyelids.
You know what I was thinking. You have to stand there and hold like a coat hanger a certain way and your TV in the other hand. Oh, sure you can get PBS.
I'm gonna buy it. Though it looks great.
Why not? It is good, and I would say I would say it's worth roughly sixty dollars. It's pretty good. But anyway, Chris Christopherson figures Big into one of the episodes, like.
It's not worth more than forty five, but go ahead and pay.
That right because it goes to Kim Burn's hairdresser.
That's right, And that's quite a collection of brushes that that person has to maintain.
But Chris Christophferson is interviewed like today, Oh interesting, he looks exactly like let's see now.
Well, I'll try to get him on movie Crush because he played the City Winery, which is like attached store building basically, So I will try and get people from over there on the basis of like are you gotta do is walk over the across the parking lot?
Right.
His manager emailed me back and said, and this should hearten you as well, said I'm actually at stuff. You should know. Fan nice the manager and said, but you know what, he doesn't really do interviews anymore. So maybe I just got the easy the easy pass, right, But man, I really wanted that one to come through to dude in this office. It would have been pretty special. Yeah, but I'm no ken Burns. No, who is ken Burns?
Yeah? That's true.
All right, let's talk. Should we take a break.
Let's go back chuck a little bit, let's get in the way back machine. It's been a little while. Okay, we're going to go back, and we even know exactly what we're going back to. One thirty PM on September nineteenth, nineteen ninety one.
Whoa ninety one. I'm in college. It's a salad days. I'm wearing a Flavor Flave clock around my neck.
Nice. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah, that's all I have to say about that.
I never wore the flavor of flaveclock. But he kind to let that be. Well I should have. I was not cool enough, but I was listening to Apocalypse ninety one.
No, I'm saying, you shouldn't have admitted that you didn't work.
Now, I know, okay, but no one believe that. You know, I'm not that cool, you know.
Aaron Cooper made a pretty awesome one of my favorite ones of all time was US as Public Enemy, and I think I'm flavor flavor in it. But you look like Chuck D. And Chuck D. It's a cool. It's a cool photoshop of us.
I tried to get Chuck D on movie Crushed Too.
Did he play the City Winery?
No? But he lives in Atlanta.
Oh, I didn't know that.
And at least part time.
Boy did he say?
He didn't say anything because the management company out emailed said we don't manage him anymore. So it was just a dead end.
I gotcha.
But Chuck d if you're listening upon City Market, let's come, let's talk about your favorite movie.
Right, and also shout out to Chris Christophferson's manager.
That's right, of course.
All right, boy, we're gonna have to go back and edit all this out. Now.
It's one thirty pm it September nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, and we are hiking with Erica and Helmut Simon. They're German, but we are hiking in the oats all Alps in Italy.
Yes, between Italy and Austria, like right on the border, very close to the border, and on this peak. The Simons decided that as they were descending that they would take a short cut. And the shortcut took them through this past pastor crevass, and in this little shallow crevass, they said, oh, there's a there's a dead body, there's a corpse.
And you were like what I was, because we are there too, right yeah, And I said.
It's right on time, boy, right exactly, yeah, that's great. So the thing is is they could they could see it was a cadaver, Like they could see the corpses back, back of the head, arm hanging out, and they just thought, well, we heard that there was a hiker that was recently killed, and that's probably who that is. We'll take a couple of pictures and go down and tell somebody who owns like the nearest line.
Right, and on the way down, you and I are going like, that was not a hiker that was recently killed.
No, even I knew that, Like, did you see that guy?
He was super old.
He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy.
And the Simons were not crazy, but I'm sure they were saying the same thing. They were just out of your shot.
Right, So they they some people went up and I think within a day or two they went up to try to get this dead hiker who they thought was a dead hiker out and they did a terrible job with it. Yeah, they used ski poles to chip away at the ice. They used an ice hammer to chip away at the ice, damaged the body. But they think, oh, it's just like some hiker or whatever. It will be fine.
Put him in a wooden casket.
And this article makes it sound like he like the whole world or everybody who knew about this body just thought it was a modern hiker for you know, a while, until the body came down the mountain. That's not a case. One of the things that when they were getting this body out the accidentally excavated was a copper headed axe, and word got out that there was an axe with this body, and that is really weird. And it was copper copper with like a wooden shaft and everything was
clearly a very very very old axe. And so pretty quickly they realized that they were onto something.
Here for sure. And what they found out was this body hi frozen body.
Yeah.
One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever, five thousand years old.
That's the same like same little bit as when.
He goes moon Pie had time to be Abe. That was Abe's buddy. What's his name?
Oh? Man, it'll come to me later, I'll say it. People are screaming out there. I canture beer fill cos right now.
Oh what is it?
I want to say, like Chauncey or Chalmers? Is not that something very similar to that? Honestly? Look it up.
Okay, all right, I'm going to keep going. Okay, So they get this body out and removed it on September twenty third, ninety one, sealed it up, like you said, flew it out of town in a wooden coffin to Ennsbrook, the Institute of Forensic Medicine, And there was an archaeologist named Conrad Spindla there who said, this body's at least four thousand years old, at the very least.
What's abes friends name, Jasper Beery Lasper?
Yeah, of course. So they nicknamed them Utsy because of the region of the oats, all Alps. Very cute little name it is.
Other people call him frozen Fritz. Oh really yeah, I like it's the way more.
Yeah, Ootsy's nice. Yeah.
So in pretty short order they realized that what they had just excavated in the roughest possible manner and accidentally come upon was the corpse of a fifty three hundred year old old body.
Yes, And when I said the guy said it was four thousand years old, he said that was the initial, like he's at least this.
Old, right, Yeah, But it turns out that after further study, they figured out he was actually fifty three hundred years old. Right, and that he lived in the Copper Age, which was a relatively brief period in human history, but a really important one between the Neolithic Age at the end of the Neolithic Age when the first farmers started to appear, and the Bronze Age, when the first what we consider
society and civilization in history began. Right, And we know very little about this, and what these hikers had discovered was a snapshot of life during that time because Leutze appeared to have just died fell where he died.
Or died where he fell.
Yeah, that was almost there, and leaving his belongings with him, and it wasn't He wasn't like a great revered figure. He wasn't buried, he wasn't prepared. He was intact for fifty three hundred years on this glacier.
Yeah, that was the biggest deal because they have mummies, and they have older mummies, but like you said, it's their organs are removed. They're filled with you know, embalming chemicals and things they used at the time for preservation for the afterlife and all this. So this was a really big deal to find this body just really really scarily well preserved. And when we say well preserved. It
doesn't look like Chris Christofferson, but not anymore. The organs were there and like, didn't the red blood cells have stiff inside.
Still intact. Yeah, it's the oldest intact blood sample ever taken. Outsi's was so and the fact that he wasn't buried provides a snapshot. It wasn't ritualized. It was this guy was just living his life and he died and happened to be preserved perfectly. See, his belongings were preserved along with them, and things that are organic can typically typically decay long before fifty three hundred years comes and goes. So his clothing made of like different types of leather
was preserved. His his coat or cape made of woven grasses was preserved.
It was all really cool when you look at the shoes and the bear skin hat and right, it's very cool.
Bear skin hat was another one. His toolkit was preserved. All of the stuff that we had like like just kind of little hints and traces and glimpses of from different like burial caches or just happened to find some artifact or whatever. This was like a straight up polaroid picture of life in the Coppers.
Yeah, it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum of Natural History display, but it was real, right, you.
Know, well put chuck. You know who would have loved that analogy? Chris Christopher's.
It's not going to say either Jasper or Artsy.
And I don't mean would have in the fact that he's dead, I mean would have had he heard it. I agree, he's never going to hear this.
You never know.
I'm like using reverse they call his manager right now.
Well you might as well. Willie Nelson will never listen to these either, neither World Dolly Parton. Yeah, we want all the country legends listening.
Ronnie millsapp will never hear this, excuse said with this, sure, okay, not with us though, because he doesn't listen to stuff, you should know it never will.
So apparently where see actually fell was pretty lucky because it was in a very shallow crevass, and the fact that that was kind of walled up on both sides of him kept him. If he was just out in the open, the freeze thought cycle over the years would have washed everything away and ripped him apart. And it didn't happen because he kind of fell in this crevass, all five to two one hundred and thirty four pounds of him.
Yeah, which is one hundred and fifty eight centimeters and sixty one kilograms.
That's right. He had brown eyes. Apparently at five to two was even a little short for the time. But he was RiPP Yeah. He was pretty sturdy, you know, in his mid forties, like we said, and really strong legs. And you know, kind of the fun thing about this is the archaeological forensics of trying to piece together like what was he doing, how did he die? We'll get to all that, but just the fact that, like he had big legs. They were like this guy, he's probably
goat hurt her. He's walking up and down these mountains all the time, right, look at those calves.
Yeah, he looked like that guy from that one Liberty Mutual commercial. I don't know what you mean, It doesn't matter. Like ten people just laughed.
What else did he had? He had a dagger, He had that axe you were talking about. The dagger, had a wicker sheath. He had a backpack. He had a leather pouch.
Yeah. The backpack, by the way, we'll never know how it worked because it got destroyed by the people who went and really dug him out of the ice.
He had some rudimentary snow shoes. He had a belt he had in a belt that matched his cape, right, yeah, oh man, and we'll talk about that. But apparently they think that was on purpose.
Yes, that he was a bit of a fashionista. Yeah. He had a couple of like vessels that were lined with maple leaves that he used to carry embers from place to place so he wouldn't have to start a fire again. And all this stuff. You're like, I'm cool, a flint dagger, cool copper acts. Oh, some members I think it's all cool. Yeah I do too. Yeah, but I can see people out there being like, uh, talk
about math or something. Right. The thing is is like all the stuff that seems kind of boring and superficial has been so thoroughly studied that it's actually been used to paint a larger picture. Like we understand the copper age in Europe way better than we did before he was discovered, just from finding this. The few things that he died with, yeah, and him himself.
He also interestingly had sixty one tattoos all over his body.
Chuck, I've been waiting for this day. What you said tattoos correctly?
Oh you mean the tattoos.
I mean I shouldn't say anything.
So, yeah, and they were. They covered them from head to toe in different parts, and they didn't use needles back then obviously, but they would rub or cut the skin open and then rub charcoal inside. And they're all They mapped them out in twenty fifteen and organized them into nineteen groups, and they are basically, you know, like maybe three identical lines, short lines like an inch long, or like a cross, not a spiritual religious cross, but you know.
Like a plus sign, yeah, or like a Chinese character that has some inspirational association, right, perseverance or something.
You get a lower back tattoo of a thorny branch. But yeah, they mapped these all out and for a while they thought, and some people still think, because they were largely found around the joints and along his back and he had problems, and they he basically was marked up where he hurt. It looks like, right, and they thought it might have been either acup puncture points to mark or it might have been the acupuncture treatment itself.
Right, But they do think that it had something to do with acupuncture, which in and of itself was a big revelation because they thought up to that point that acupuncture had been invented two thousand years after Utzy and way further east in Asia.
Right, But now they think that may not have been the case because they found a new cluster of tattoos on his chest that they didn't formally recognize, and they were like, there are no acupuncture points there, and he didn't have any injuries there. So now they didn't throw it out with the bathwater. But there are people now they're saying like, we don't know if that's true or not.
No, Okay, So I'm really glad you said that. Everything that we know about Utzi, aside from the fact that he is dead, yeah, that we have a pretty good idea of when he lived, probably what heightweight was, stuff like that. Everything else is interpretation.
Sure, so you.
Have to remember that interpretation super educated and usually displaying the current understanding of history or interpretation of history or events, but it is still interpretation. That's part of archaeology, anthropology, and history, especially when you're talking about prehistory. Is he lived during a time before anybody wrote anything down or
recorded anything, which makes it prehistoric. But you just bear that in mind that everything we're talking about and everything you go read about Otsie is very much described in absolute terms, but it is our picture and image of him. How he lived, how he died has really shaped and shifted over the years since he was discovered, and it still is. It's still malleable. Nothing is definitive, nothing said in nice.
All right, let's take a break. It's a bad joke. We'll talk about uh Ertsy's health, right for this. Was he healthy?
I mean he was.
No, he was a person of age in his mid forties of a time where at that age he's going to be pretty beat up.
Yeah, he wasn't unhealthy in like the modern sense where he's like deliberately wrecking his health because he's eating too much junk food or something like you know me. Yeah, but he was unhealthy in the way that a person would be unhealthy from living close to the land at a time before medicine had really developed.
Yeah, exactly, no doctors, no dentists. So as you would imagine, he had gum disease, heart disease, lime disease, gall bladderstone, hardened arteries, gallstones.
Yeah, the disorder is so nice. We named it twice.
Right, he had a whipworm parasite in his gut, He had h pylori in his gut, and all of this is to say, like you said, he was probably a pretty normal dude of the mid forties of the time.
Right.
They couldn't find his stomach for a long time. It's amazing how much of the stuff like it was found over the years, Like this tattoo. This new tattoo was just found a few years ago. Yeah, after like many many years of study.
His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded people for decades.
But they couldn't even find his stomach and then finally they're like, oh, here it is. Twenty years later, they found it wedged up between his ribs and his lungs.
Yeah, then they found it because they noticed he had gallstones, so they basically traced a path from the gallbladder to the stomach and said, there it is. We found it. And they were really happy they found it because when they started to dissect did or take samples from it, they found that it was full. Yeah, he died like within an hour or so of eating his last meal and hadn't digested it. He had food in his in his colon, he had food in his intestines.
He had a turtle head peeking out right, that's awesome. What his last meal was dried ibex and deer meat with ink horn wheat.
Yes, and slow plums. I don't know why that wasn't mentioned.
He can get that same meal in Brooklyn.
Served you by a guy with a waxed mustache and like some sort of armband, an arm garter. So yeah, an arm garter. That's it. That's it, isn't it.
Yeah, that's it.
So he ate they think some sort of like fatty cured meat, kind of like a bacon, a cured bacon today. And the iron ike horn wheat was from bread. And he also ate slow plums, gotcha? Okay?
Slow plums?
Yeah, that they make slow gin from? Oh really, which I've never had, have you?
That's sloe right?
Yeah right, It's like supposedly a very tart, kind of bitterish plum, but it was it's like load of vitamins.
I've never had it. And remember it seemed like an old person. Drink was a slow jin fizz.
Like an old person who's like one hundred and fifty years old.
Yes, when I lived in Arizona, there were all the snowbirds were down there. They drink like slowjin fizzs.
Really, I've never been present when somebody ordered a slow gin fizz. Yeah, I would like to try one. So sure I try one. Okay, Josh, go.
Get a couple of slow gin phizzies.
Stat make it a double.
I guarantee you there's a bar in this dumb building that has slow jin pzzis on the venue.
Sure you know with arm guards? Can I keep the arm guard comes with a drink.
So let's talk a little bit more about the copper Age. I guess he had. Well, what we'll save his injuries for a minute here, Okay, we'll talk about a little about his lifestyle in the copper Age. Like you said, he was, as demonstrated by his meals, he looked a pretty like farmy pleasant life down there, it seems like, but not one without conflict, you know.
Sure, based on his meals, well.
Based on his meals, he lived a farming type lifestyle. But based on injuries we're going to talk about it seems like that, you know, he had some enemies.
So from what I saw, and I mean, we used a lot of different articles, but National Geographic is very well represented in here Live Sciencehistory dot com, the BBC. I came across something from the Penn Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum or U Penn Museum. I think they have a magazine called Expedition that was pretty awesome, had a pretty great thing. And I saw a couple of things from historians that wrote up basically descriptions of Utsy and thought co which is just a surprising great resource.
Yeah, yeah, have you ever noticed, yes, yep.
So in one of these I saw that it was kind of put like he lived as a farmer and enjoyed like the fruits of village life too, so things like cheese and processed grains and cereals, so bread and stuff like that. And the idea is that he didn't know how to bake bread or make cheese. He was part of a village or a society where somebody knew how to bake bread and somebody knew how to make cheese,
so the professions were starting to emerge. But that he also was pastoral and that like he herded sheep and that's probably what he did most of it most of the time. And then he also lived very close to the earth the land as well, Like his last meal was wild game ibecs and deer and slow plums that he probably plucked himself. So he was kind of like this transitional human from the hunter gather are passed into the agrarian, agriculture based future that spread out just ahead of them.
Yeah, like just ahead of them were like real deal Italians out there. Yeah, bacon bagets.
Yeah, well that's French.
Yeah, what I mean Italian bread?
Yeah? Yeah, in Italy they just call him bread.
That's right. They I mentioned earlier that his clothes matched and they do think, and of course again this is all speculation, but these garments were pretty refined, even when you look at him now, like he had these fur skin leggings that were held up by suspenders.
By Alexander McQueen.
Oh man, I wouldn't say that.
I know. That was amazing, so good.
And a great documentary on him too. It's good and sad. The they talk about the color of the animal skin zone, the contrasting colors they think were actually matched like elaborately, and he had, like, like you said, a sense of style,
like you know, is that possible? Yeah, but I mean it seems like a lot to extrapolate that his coat and his belt matched, and so they were like, hey, he had a real personal identity, whereas in it could have been just like that's the materials that he had on hand that fit.
That's possible. But I think what they're what they would assert is that it has enough panache. Yeah, that the chances of it just being random are very unlikely or less likely than it being you know, asserting his sense of fashion.
Well, and he was Italian, that's right, So you know Italians in their fashion go hand in hand.
I love it. Everyone who's been to Millino knows that, or fearensy.
I remember when I was touring Europe as a youth, my friend and I laughing at the Italian guys and the hostels were like, these nineteen year old dudes were so put together and like would spend so much time in the mirror, wearing the cologne and getting their hair just perfect. Yeah, we are just disgusting humans. Sure, and they got the girls, so yeah, it turns out that they were onto something.
A little bit of extraff really does it and the big hair.
Yeah, they were great guys. So we met some cool Italian dudes.
One of the other things too, though, that the fact that he clearly was involved in a village. They think that he was associated with a particular village to the south in a valley near the mountains. It was things like bread and cheese that they think they found in his body. But also the fact that he did not He obviously didn't know how to make his own tools. Somebody else had. He probably did not know how to weave the cape he was wearing. Somebody else had done that.
Yeah, they all had their specialties. Yeah.
The tattoos, he couldn't have put some of them on his own body. He probably went to see a medical practitioner to do that. So, yeah, this is at a point when specialists and specialized professians are starting to emerge.
Yeah, it's a really cool time.
Yeah, and this is these are the things that we've learned from, you know, that we've gleaned from the stuff that we found with him. I think it's just astoundingly fascinating.
Yeah, it's really cool. This is a really interesting period I think of human development.
It's also called, by the way, the copper age or the chalcolithic I like copper age. I do too, Chalcolithic just kind of coughs out of the mouth, isn't it.
Yeah, So we'll talk a little bit about what might have happened to Utsy and how he found himself dead on that mountain, because there are quite a few theories over the years, and like you said, even this week they have some more leads. But he was wounded. He had a really bad wound on his right hand. They found out he was right handed too, so this is a big deal between his thumb and his forefinger there. That area went all the way down to the bone.
But it looks like it had healed up a little bit, so it probably happened, they said, within a few days when he died, but it was healing. But it was a big injury, like we said, because he was right handed, But it's not the kind of thing that killed him, Like he didn't bleed out from that or anything like that.
No, huh. So it makes you think, well, what did kill him then?
Right, Well, they think that might have been from a fight. Perhaps that wound.
That has been almost universally agreed upon from the outset right that he probably didn't inflict that wound himself. That it seems to have been a defensive wound. There's a guy named Alexander Horn who's an inspector with the Munich Police, and so we should give just a little background for a second. When Utsi was found, he was taken into
Germany down the mountain into Austria Innsbruck. Austria and the Germans were heavily involved as well as the Austrians and the Italians were less involved, and that's where he kind of stayed for the first few years, I think about a decade or less after he was discovered. And then eventually he was transferred to Italy, the Italian side.
Yeah, because they were like, he's a founder on our side. Yeah, like it just to barely I think.
Also, I don't know if this contributed to her if it came later, but he does seem to have been linked to the Italian side, where like you said, he was an Italian, right, So he was transferred to Italy and when they took custody of him, man they pulled out all the stops. They put him up in Balzano, Italy, near about I think like thirty miles or something from
where he was found. They built a museum specifically for him, an institute built around studying him, and they proceeded to study him more than any other mummy has ever been studied, probably any other body than has ever been studied in the history of the world. Yeah, for sure, and have just churned out paper after paper after paper based on
their findings from him. So but at first, some of the ideas that we have about what happened to him come from the earliest interpretations posed by the Germans in the Austrians when they had custody of Vizzi.
Right, which weren't necessarily right, as it turns out, no, but.
Some may have been. But my ultimate point was everybody says from the outset that he wound the wound in his hand was a defensive wound that came from close combat with somebody else.
That's right. For a while they thought there was an Austrian archaeologist named Conrad Spindler that I mentioned earlier that they sort of recreated the scene, and their contention early on was like man that acts is leaning up against the rock, it's propped up there, like we think everything is literally frozen in time from how it was. And I think that's one of the things that they've later refuted, right, and they said that it looks like things might have moved around some.
Yeah, they think that the what would you call it, the site I guess from the freeze thaw cycle just kind of distributed, redistributed the stuff.
Yeah, which you know, it's still all valid, but not necessarily it was not necessarily exactly as it was at his moment of death. Indeed, they did find his hat though, off of his head, as if it just like kind of fell off of his head, which might have been true.
Right. So some of those early stuff, they also found what they thought were fractured ribs that had not healed. Right, So the earliest picture was this like they treated it like this is a dead body mystery. Where did this dead body come from? How did he die?
Yeah? Well quickly though, they also found pollen in his gut that they thought came from an autumn plant, so they were like, he died in the fall, right, Okay, so that's the full setup of the bad information.
So the first idea, and I think it was Spindler who came up with the disaster theory, was I think so Conrad Spindler said, Okay, here's what happened to outsy he came down from the mountain, probably hurting some sheep or goats in the fall, went down to his village and gotten an altercation with somebody, cut his hand.
You're looking at my wife, right, that kind of thing.
That's nice, and he fled or oh, and part of the altercation also resulted in some cracked ribs, right, and either fled or laughter escaped up the mountain again where he became exhausted from his cracked ribs and his cut hand, and he laid down or fell into this little shallow crevasse and died of exposure to hypothermia. That was the disaster theory, and that was that, you know, I mean they had that for a few years, and somebody came along and said, I don't think that's right.
That's right, because they found out some of the things, like the site had melted some and then things were in different positions they originally thought. Probably they examined the ribs again and said they were actually not fractured before he died.
Yeah, that they were just a little bent.
Yeah, from like after his death.
Probably from the push of ice, the pressure from ice feezing on him.
Again exactly'll that'll crack your ribs in a second, or binga ribs.
The big one, though, was what they found in the X ray in two thousand and one.
Right, you know what they found? Should we take a break? Oh yeah, all right, we'll discover what they found right after this.
Where did they find Chuck?
They found a freaking arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, back shoulder.
That was a verbatim quote from the press conference. This was a big deal.
They missed it for ten years, they missed the thing, and they found it. Yeah, it was just a regular X ray and they said, wait a minute, that looks denser than bone. Yeah, what is that.
It's a triangle.
It's a triangle. And it was a thirteen millimeter gash along a major artery in his chest. And they're like, he bled to death up there.
Yeah, they said, there's no way he would have survived this. It is unhealed. This is finally what killed him. So this disaster theory that he got in an altercation but ultimately died of exposure or hypothermia was replaced by the murder theory, right, which is very similar, but there's some important nuances and differences. One, so the cracked rib thing just throw that away. It was a red herring, but
the altercation is still the same. He comes down the mountain, he gets in a fight of some sort, goes back up the mountain with his cut hand, and while he's hanging out, maybe tending to his wound, maybe trying to figure out what to do next. That's my arrow impression.
Message for you, sir.
Yeah, yeah, right in the back, in the back from a distance, they think due to the penetration from the arrowhead from about thirty meters.
Yeah, it's good shot.
Ye, that is it is a good shot because it was a kill shot from thirty meters one hundred and fifty feet. That's a waste. Yeah, I can't quite put it into an easy analogy, but that's a long that's a long way. Yeah. And the fact that it was in the back. He never saw it coming and it would have killed him pretty quickly.
It was a punk move, is what it was. It was.
Here's the thing, because his possessions were left intact and because he had that defensive wound.
Yeah, they think that this was.
The result of his death, as murder was the result of a personal conflict. There was no theft involved or anything like that, right, because his copper axe alone would have been pretty valuable at the time that somebody would have taken it had they killed him for something like robbery.
Yeah, so this was a vendetta, yes, or it released a personal fight that happened that day, yeah, or maybe a long standing feud. There's no way to tell.
Here. We reached the point where the historians and the archaeologists are like, we really can't say, but here are some ideas.
Yeah. Yeah.
For me, it's either the person who he fought came back for revenge. I think, and this is a total guest, but I was trained in history, so I'm allowed to do that.
Sure he was trained in history.
Yeah, it was. I studied history in college. That's what they call it. They're like, this is how you do it, trained history camp. Right. He was successful in that hand to hand combat and killed the other person. Whether it was offensive or defensive. I like to think it was defensive. He didn't have a choice. But the person's family came back and killed him up on the mountain, gotcha. That's
the current idea. Well, not that last part that it was his family, but what I said leading up to that, everything about that, everything else about that I'm really sorry, Chris Christofferson. That's the current idea of what happened to it.
I think. So you're not going with my jealous lover theory.
No, okay, no, I'm not all right.
I think it was a woman with that arrow.
You think the woman a woman shot him?
Yeah, jealous lover. I think he was stepping out and he was like holding up his hands like baby, baby, it wouldn't me. And she slices them with the her implement of choice and then dice ism with the era and then he's like, this is getting too serious. You're crazy, and so he heads up the mountains and she's like, I'll show you crazy. She turns into close, she goes and forges an arrow, and then in that time it took her to forge that arrow from hardened molten you know, flint.
Flint shirt chirt.
He's up that hill a little bit and she's like, no problem, watch this right in the back.
I like that one too, all right. I'm going with family, family, because I mean, yeah, you know the rule, can't trust family, trust family.
So, speaking of that chirt, he did not have he didn't have blanks.
Yeah, so this is evidence that he didn't know how to create his own tools.
Yeah, somebody applicate these tools, which apparently were sort of on their last legs.
Yeah, that was another thing too, So he did not have what he needed. Like imagine if you had if you had like a a tool an X no, a knife, okay, and it's made a flint and you use it over and over and over again, it's gonna get worn down and eventually it's gonna get so worn down that you just can't use it anymore. This is essentially the state of his arrowheads and his knife and some of his
other his stone tools. In particular, that he was not in a position to defend himself with his own tools because he'd used them up.
And I wonder if if he's not making these in the village, if they're like Ertsy's, you know, he's have you guys noticed he's on the way out, Like, we're not going to be making any more tools for Artsy, right, yeah, I can. We don't have He'll just make do with what he's got.
It's a but he owes me money.
So should we talk about moss. This was astounding to me that this happened in the last few days, because did you pick this out before this happened, or was it serenigity?
This is what I saw that it made me say it's time.
Okay, I got you. So researchers found these moth spores that were inside of him, that he'd ingested, and just on him and around him. M hm. Seventy percent of the seventy five species of these mosses and liverwarts were not local. And they basically said, there's no way these would have been on the side of the mountain if not for him.
Right like a bird couldn't have transported it this far or something like that, like the UTSI brought these up here. And so in doing that and tracing like these mosses and spores and everything, they have a big clue. They've been able to retrace his steps that last basically thirty three hours of his life, the last day and a half, and it was not a great day and a half for him. He had his hand wound. By now, by the time we're coming in here, he's already got his
hand wound. It's got to be smarting. And it's a real problem for him too, because even if he could make tools, he would have been really troubled to do anything because he was right handed and that's where his wound, almost down to the bone was was in his right hand. Yeah, so that's a big problem for him right there.
Yeah. So what they found in this lower colon, which would have been the last I'm sorry, the oldest stuff that he had eaten that has not yet been the turtle head yet, not turtle headed yet or I guess currently turtle headed. Yeah, were pine and spruce pollen, so they said, And it's kind of neat. That's what I love about this, like historical forensics, like, oh, well, we know what was in his body, and we know where
that stuff is. It's not at certain altitudes. It was a high altitude for us, around eighty two hundred feet and they know because of where it was in his body. This is thirty three hours before he died. But the middle tract of his colon, that's where all the secrets are. In the colon. Yeah, you know, it had pollen from hop hornbeam and that's stuff from lower altitudes.
It's from lower altitude. But also it grows only in the spring and summer. It decays very quickly, so it's not something that you would preserve and keep for the fall or the winter.
Throw out the autumn theory.
Yep, So they say he definitely died in the summer, right and spring.
I guess that means that he probably descended maybe all the way to the bottom of the valley within twelve hours, maybe nine to twelve hours of his death, and then all the way back up again.
Right where he was found dead. And they figured all this out. They retraced all this just from those spores and mosses.
Amazing, they think.
Maybe so he's down in the valley to begin with, or in the village, gets that hand wound, flees up to the tree line, and then they think.
Because he's like the little lady always needs a few days to cool off.
Right, Oh man, you're gonna get some meal for that one. I rechecked my right by the way. So and then he goes back down, they think, to get some mosses because they have anti bacterial properties.
Yeah, you can also wrap meat in it, right apparently.
To I guess, keep it or whatever. But also they may he may have wrapped his hand in it or something as well.
Or maybe when he saw a doctor.
Maybe then he goes back up to the tree to above the tree line where he dies at about ten five hundred feet. That's along the way he had that last meal of ibis and deer and bread and slow plums.
Pretty good meal, not bad.
I wonder if he was panicked, if he knew like, I'm in a bad way because of this cut on my hand, and my tools and arrow heads are not in good shape.
I don't know, because it's interesting you only know that stuff from seeing it at that point in history, Like it would have been like, boy, I've seen that kind of wound before on oh yeah, tuck, tuck, And yeah, he did not last long.
But if you've thought somebody was coming after you, and you knew that your arrowhead was useless and your knife was like dull and your your stab in hand was cut to the bone, right, you probably wouldn't have had to have seen that before to be.
Like, uh probably so well, he was in full retreat from what it looks like, right, Yeah, I mean that's why he was going up.
That Mountain's that's what most people guess.
Yeah, so he was probably scared.
Yeah, which is sad, but that's how he spent this last day and a half kind of on the run up and down the mountain, which is pretty impressive that he was able to make. You know, he went up and down the mountain, don't for sure. He was wearing moccas and stuff with grass.
And he was old for the time.
Sure, and he had ginger vitis.
Kind of a neat thing is they have found they found some weird markers on his male sex chromosomes and they've actually traced some genetic relatives at least nineteen people living today, yeah in Austria or.
Not married but related to Utsy.
Yeah. Pretty neat.
Yeah, I think so too. So check. There's another theory that says, hey, you know, your whole murder theory it's bs. Maybe the murder part is correct, but he was murdered ritually. This isn't a vendette or anything like that. Utsie was buried.
Right, They think that this was a ritual burial on top of a mountain, but he you know, it's not the kind of Maybe they just want a group that removed the organs and did that stuff, right.
Yeah, So the premise of the burial theory, called the social theory, is that he's not a snapshot of everyday life, right, that they didn't that he would have been so heavily laden with all of this stuff because we didn't even say he had a bow and arrow, yeahvert a knife, a hatchet. He was wearing moccasins with grass, and they're kind of like, seriously, that's the best they could do
at this time for hiking a mountain. That's the shoes you wore, Like, those aren't mountain hiking shoes at any point in his And the fact that the shaft of the arrow was removed, I think they point to is an example of the idea that he was buried, that he was killed ritually and buried in this.
Oh so they think the killing was a ritual killing too, a sacrificial killing. Yeah, oh I didn't get that part.
And the other thing is they're saying, like this stuff, these fancy Alexander McQueen leggings that he wore that were basically the predecessor of later hosen, that is some pretty nice stuff for a simple like sheep herder? Is it to be wearing? That's this is what the social theory
people are saying. Yeah, they're like, we think this guy was actually kind of important and that he was buried here as a sign a symbol, and what they found, or what they point to is that there's stella like monolists that were carved in the Lake copper Age a thousand or two thousand years after Utsi because he was born at the beginning of the Copper Age, that our depictions of somebody dressed a lot like Utzy and they think that these are like heroes and legends, ancestors, and
they're saying, this guy's wearing what these people were carving images of a thousand years later. Maybe he was kind of important and maybe this is a bit.
He also had some ornamentation too, didn't he Yeah, like a marble bead, Yeah, which you know could mean something or could not.
But the fact that he had so much stuff with him does kind of support the idea that maybe it was a burial and then they.
Just send him into the afterlife with all the things he would need.
Right exactly. And then the other one is no one's ever explained how he was so well preserved that apparently being frozen by ice doesn't cut it. Oh really, Yeah, that other people have been found who died far later and were in way worse states of decay than Utsie was.
But they found no like chemical preservation, no evidence or anything.
No, And admittedly sides, if either one of them are being honest, they will say, we don't know how much he was this well preserved quite a mystery still to this day. As much as we know about him, he is still a mystery. He's our love and mystery man.
That's right.
If you want to know more about let's see, go type Otzi in your favorite search bar and it will bring up some fascinating stuff. And since I said that, time for listener.
Man, I'm gonna call this the accidental iron Man. Hey, guys, big fan for a long time. I accidentally did my first iron Man in July twenty eighteen. And you might think, how in the world would that happen?
I was thinking exactly, here's how that happens.
I've been doing triathlon since twenty fifteen, always planned on doing an iron Man at one point or at some point. My plan was to do a half iron Man in twenty eighteen, do the full thing in twenty nineteen. I wanted to do the Iron Man like Placid, since it's reasonably close and as a lake swim as opposed to river or in ocean swim. That's a hard race. To
get into though, because it sells out so fast. I got an email told me registration was open, and in my excitement I misread it and thought it was for the half, so I signed up and realized after the fact that it was the entire one hundred and forty point six race and not the seventy point three. Triathlons don't do refunds, so I paid my eight hundred dollars plus entry fee and couldn't get it back. I could have deferred for a year, but it's decided just to
go for it. And I finished the race in fifteen hours, two minutes and forty three seconds. Nice work, and that is from John Patanyak. And I email John Backen It's like, you want to give me a couple of little tidbits here for listener mail, and he said sure, and he wrote back and he said, one thing I can say is it really takes over your personal life. At my peak, I was training twenty hours a week. And he said
that is literally just pool, bike or running. He said, doesn't count travel to and from the gym, cooking meals, prepping equipment. He said, it's literally like a part time job. And he said the race was a lot of fun. He said. The Lake Placid course goes through the old Olympic structures from the nineteen eighty Olympics, and you finish at the finish line and the speed skating oval. Oh, that's nat Yeah, it's pretty cool. He cine picture.
It's like urban exploration Iron Range.
And he said. One of the cool things they do if your first timer is you wear an orange wristband so all the volunteers and crowd will give you extra support and it says I will become one on it. And he said, it really works. And he said, and finally at the end, the race is so meaningful to so many people. Everyone has their own story. But almost nothing is better after a year of training than hearing you are iron Man. When he crossed the finish line.
That's awesome. They have Ozzie singing it. I would I would too.
Who else I don't know.
I guess theo could again.
That is John Potoniac. Dio is dead, Oh is he? Yeah, Ronnie James Dio's passed on. When within the last couple of years.
Okay, yeah, one of the coolest tattoos I've ever seen. Somebody got like on their arm, their forearm. I have seen that, so that when they make like the devil horns or whatever, it's Ronnie Dio making the devil horns and the person's.
Fingers comes your arms. Yeah, it's really neat.
It is.
I saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest tattoo I've ever seen.
I think it might be. It's pretty Hats off to Chris Christofferson's manager, who actually is the person with that that?
That's right?
Uh. If you want to get in touch with us, like who is that?
John Patoniac?
Thanks John? If you want to get in touch with us like John, congratulations too. You can go on to Stuff you Should Know and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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