Otzi the Iceman is one of those amazing discoveries that continues, even decades after the original find, to surprise us with new bits of information. The glossary entry includes a summary, and you'll find some news stories, a bibliography, and even an extended joke in the Bulwer-Lytton style.
This entry is a summary of everything known about Otzi that's been published to date: where he was born, where he lived, how tall he was, what he weighed, what he ate, what he did for a living, what his clothes were like, how old he was, and what killed him. We don't know why he was killed--but science suggests that somebody didn't like him very much at all.
Studies of the Iceman's innards revealed a surprising variety of mosses, from different climate regimes suggesting that Otzi was a local man who knew and traveled the Alpine region widely
Using multislice computed tomography, a research team from the Swiss Mummy Project at the University of Zurich discovered a 13-mm tear in an artery in the Iceman's chest, and have pinpointed what they think led to the Iceman's death.
A summary and links to detailed news stories about the MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry used to examine Otzi's clothes.
A list of the journal articles and books written about Otzi to date.
T.R. Talbott won a dishonorable mention in the 1997 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest (where WWW means "Wretched Writers Welcome"). He (or she, I was never able to contact him or her) took as his/her text the Iceman--and every time I read it I laugh out loud.
No comments:
Post a Comment