June 15, 2024 • 53 mins
About 5,300 years ago a Copper Age shepherd was murdered. He just happened to die in a place where his body was so well preserved that gave researchers an actual shot at determining the course of his final day on Earth. Josh and Chuck take you through their reconstruction in this classic episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Guest uh ghost host Chuck?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Are you a ghost now? Did you die? Now?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I just thought if there was two josh is in here,
I feel a little left out.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Oh I see and ganged up on.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, I just I had no clever way to say it.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Ghost host, You're right about that.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
My mouth is working today, my brain.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
That's all right. It's been a long week already. It's
only Tuesday, really right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Is it just me?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
No, it's been a long week.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yes, it's it'sy okay, rhymes with tutsy. I saw someone
put it. I think are good friends at Smithsonian Magazine.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, it's ittsy. There's a bit of an R in there.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah, I like ittsy all right, like Tutsy Rollsy the
Dead Mummy. It'sy.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
This is a good one. This is exciting. I've been
wanting to do one on this one too.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Sure, I'm sure that's where that comes from.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, really like in the past few days even.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah. I've been interested in this since I saw the
facial reconstruction photos. I was like, or's he was Jack Palance?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Chris Christophferson?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Okay, dude, A little bit of both.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
No, it's like they said, mister Christophferson, please come in
so we can.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Remember, Yeah, look there's Chris Christofferson kidding, that's it'sy.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, I mean it's me and Bobby McGee right there.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Exactly Did you see that Ken Burns documentary?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So good.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Oh wow, PBS gives it away for free.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
What do you got some PBS connection?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
No, it was on PBS for a while.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Oh do you have cable or something? See, I don't
have I don't.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Even think you have to have cable. Oh you mean
like like you just stream? Yes, you're you're up the creek.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
I'm gonna buy it. Though it looks great.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
It's not worth more than forty five, but go ahead
and pay.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
That right because it goes to Kim Burn's hairdresser.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
That's right, And that's quite a collection of brushes that
that person has to maintain.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
But Chris Christophferson is interviewed like today, Oh interesting, he
looks exactly like let's see now.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
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?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
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
(05:12):
in this office. It would have been pretty special. Yeah,
but I'm no ken Burns. No, who is ken Burns?
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah? That's true.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
All right, let's talk. Should we take a break.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Whoa ninety one. I'm in college. It's a salad days.
I'm wearing a Flavor Flave clock around my neck.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Nice. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah, that's
all I have to say about that.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
No, I'm saying, you shouldn't have admitted that you didn't work.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Now, I know, okay, but no one believe that. You know,
I'm not that cool, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I tried to get Chuck D on movie Crushed Too.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Did he play the City Winery?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
No? But he lives in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
And at least part time.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Boy did he say?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I gotcha.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
But Chuck d if you're listening upon City Market, let's come,
let's talk about your favorite movie.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Right, and also shout out to Chris Christophferson's manager.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That's right, of course.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
All right, boy, we're gonna have to go back and
edit all this out. Now.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
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
(07:30):
a corpse.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
And you were like what I was, because we are
there too, right yeah, And I said.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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
(07:56):
of pictures and go down and tell somebody who owns
like the nearest line.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Right, and on the way down, you and I are
going like, that was not a hiker that was recently killed.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
No, even I knew that, Like, did you see that guy?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
He was super old.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And the Simons were not crazy, but I'm sure they
were saying the same thing. They were just out of
your shot.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
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,
(08:41):
it's just like some hiker or whatever. It will be fine.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Put him in a wooden casket.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
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,
(09:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Here for sure. And what they found out was this
body hi frozen body.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever, five thousand years old.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That's the same like same little bit as when.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
He goes moon Pie had time to be Abe. That
was Abe's buddy. What's his name?
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Oh? Man, it'll come to me later, I'll say it.
People are screaming out there. I canture beer fill cos
right now.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Oh what is it?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I want to say, like Chauncey or Chalmers? Is not
that something very similar to that? Honestly? Look it up.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
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
(10:24):
four thousand years old, at the very least.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What's abes friends name, Jasper Beery Lasper?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, of course. So they nicknamed them Utsy because of
the region of the oats, all Alps. Very cute little
name it is.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Other people call him frozen Fritz. Oh really yeah, I
like it's the way more.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, Ootsy's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
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
(11:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Or died where he fell.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
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
(12:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
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
(12:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
It was all really cool when you look at the
shoes and the bear skin hat and right, it's very cool.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum
of Natural History display, but it was real, right, you.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Know, well put chuck. You know who would have loved
that analogy? Chris Christopher's.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
It's not going to say either Jasper or Artsy.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
You never know.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I'm like using reverse they call his manager right now.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
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
(14:42):
didn't happen because he kind of fell in this crevass,
all five to two one hundred and thirty four pounds
of him.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, which is one hundred and fifty eight centimeters and
sixty one kilograms.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
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
(15:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
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
(16:26):
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
(16:48):
he died with, yeah, and him himself.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
He also interestingly had sixty one tattoos all over his body.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Chuck, I've been waiting for this day. What you said
tattoos correctly?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Oh you mean the tattoos.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I mean I shouldn't say anything.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
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
(17:28):
maybe three identical lines, short lines like an inch long,
or like a cross, not a spiritual religious cross, but
you know.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Like a plus sign, yeah, or like a Chinese character
that has some inspirational association, right, perseverance or something.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
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
(18:09):
mark or it might have been the acupuncture treatment itself.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Sure, so you.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
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
(19:28):
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
(19:48):
shifted over the years since he was discovered, and it
still is. It's still malleable. Nothing is definitive, nothing said
in nice.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
All right, let's take a break. It's a bad joke.
We'll talk about uh Ertsy's health, right for this. Was
(20:23):
he healthy?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
I mean he was.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, exactly, no doctors, no dentists. So as you would imagine,
he had gum disease, heart disease, lime disease, gall bladderstone,
hardened arteries, gallstones.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, the disorder is so nice. We named it twice.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded people for decades.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
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
(22:07):
and hadn't digested it. He had food in his in
his colon, he had food in his intestines.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Yes, and slow plums. I don't know why that wasn't mentioned.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
He can get that same meal in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Slow plums?
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, that they make slow gin from? Oh really, which
I've never had, have you?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
That's sloe right?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah right, It's like supposedly a very tart, kind of
bitterish plum, but it was it's like load of vitamins.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I've never had it. And remember it seemed like an
old person. Drink was a slow jin fizz.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Like an old person who's like one hundred and fifty
years old.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yes, when I lived in Arizona, there were all the
snowbirds were down there. They drink like slowjin fizzs.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Get a couple of slow gin phizzies.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Stat make it a double.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I guarantee you there's a bar in this dumb building
that has slow jin pzzis on the venue.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Sure you know with arm guards? Can I keep the
arm guard comes with a drink.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
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,
(24:08):
but not one without conflict, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Sure, based on his meals, well.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
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
(24:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Yeah, yeah, have you ever noticed, yes, yep.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:06):
of them.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, like just ahead of them were like real deal
Italians out there. Yeah, bacon bagets.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah, well that's French.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, what I mean Italian bread?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah? Yeah, in Italy they just call him bread.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
By Alexander McQueen.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Oh man, I wouldn't say that.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I know. That was amazing, so good.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
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
(27:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Well, and he was Italian, that's right, So you know
Italians in their fashion go hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
I love it. Everyone who's been to Millino knows that,
or fearensy.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
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
(28:05):
they were onto something.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
A little bit of extraff really does it and the
big hair.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, they were great guys. So we met some cool
Italian dudes.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
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
(28:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, they all had their specialties. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah, it's a really cool time.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, it's really cool. This is a really interesting period
I think of human development.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
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
(29:48):
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,
(30:09):
Like he didn't bleed out from that or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
No, huh. So it makes you think, well, what did
kill him then?
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Right, Well, they think that might have been from a fight.
Perhaps that wound.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
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
(30:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, because they were like, he's a founder on our side. Yeah,
like it just to barely I think.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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
(31:26):
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
(31:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Right, which weren't necessarily right, as it turns out, no, but.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
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,
(32:40):
and they said that it looks like things might have
moved around some.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
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?
Speaker 2 (33:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You're looking at my wife, right, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
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
(34:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yeah, that they were just a little bent.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Yeah, from like after his death.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Probably from the push of ice, the pressure from ice
feezing on him.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Again exactly'll that'll crack your ribs in a second, or
binga ribs.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
The big one, though, was what they found in the
X ray in two thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Right, you know what they found? Should we take a break?
Oh yeah, all right, we'll discover what they found right
after this.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Where did they find Chuck?
Speaker 2 (35:33):
They found a freaking arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, back shoulder.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
That was a verbatim quote from the press conference. This
was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
It's a triangle.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
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
(36:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Message for you, sir.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, it's good shot.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
It was a punk move, is what it was. It was.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Here's the thing, because his possessions were left intact and
because he had that defensive wound.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, they think that this was.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Here. We reached the point where the historians and the
archaeologists are like, we really can't say, but here are
some ideas.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Sure he was trained in history.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
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
(38:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
I think. So you're not going with my jealous lover theory.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
No, okay, no, I'm not all right.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
I think it was a woman with that arrow.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
You think the woman a woman shot him?
Speaker 2 (39:05):
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
(39:27):
and forges an arrow, and then in that time it
took her to forge that arrow from hardened molten you know, flint.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Flint shirt chirt.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
He's up that hill a little bit and she's like,
no problem, watch this right in the back.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So, speaking of that chirt, he did not have he
didn't have blanks.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, so this is evidence that he didn't know how
to create his own tools.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, somebody applicate these tools, which apparently were sort of
on their last legs.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
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
(40:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
It's a but he owes me money.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
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?
Speaker 1 (41:15):
This is what I saw that it made me say
it's time.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
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
(41:39):
would have been on the side of the mountain if
not for him.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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
(42:03):
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,
(42:25):
so that's a big problem for him right there.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
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
(42:49):
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
(43:11):
hop hornbeam and that's stuff from lower altitudes.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Throw out the autumn theory.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Yep, So they say he definitely died in the summer,
right and spring.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Right where he was found dead. And they figured all
this out. They retraced all this just from those spores
and mosses.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Amazing, they think.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Because he's like the little lady always needs a few
days to cool off.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, you can also wrap meat in it, right apparently.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
To I guess, keep it or whatever. But also they
may he may have wrapped his hand in it or
something as well.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Or maybe when he saw a doctor.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Pretty good meal, not bad.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
That Mountain's that's what most people guess.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah, so he was probably scared.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
And he was old for the time.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Sure, and he had ginger vitis.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Not married but related to Utsy.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah. Pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
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
(46:51):
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
(47:15):
he was killed ritually and buried in this.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Oh so they think the killing was a ritual killing too,
a sacrificial killing. Yeah, oh I didn't get that part.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
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
(47:46):
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
(48:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
He also had some ornamentation too, didn't he Yeah, like
a marble bead, Yeah, which you know could mean something
or could not.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Just send him into the afterlife with all the things
he would need.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
But they found no like chemical preservation, no evidence or anything.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
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?
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I was thinking exactly, here's how that happens.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
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
(50:04):
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
(50:26):
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,
(50:48):
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
(51:09):
at the finish line and the speed skating oval. Oh,
that's nat Yeah, it's pretty cool. He cine picture.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
It's like urban exploration Iron Range.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
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
(51:39):
you are iron Man. When he crossed the finish line.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
That's awesome. They have Ozzie singing it. I would I
would too.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
Who else I don't know.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
I guess theo could again.
Speaker 2 (51:50):
That is John Potoniac. Dio is dead, Oh is he? Yeah,
Ronnie James Dio's passed on. When within the last couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Fingers comes your arms. Yeah, it's really neat.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
It is.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
I saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest
tattoo I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
I think it might be. It's pretty Hats off to
Chris Christofferson's manager, who actually is the person with that that?
Speaker 2 (52:29):
That's right?
Speaker 1 (52:30):
Uh. If you want to get in touch with us,
like who is that?
Speaker 2 (52:34):
John Patoniac?
Speaker 1 (52:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
Guest uh ghost host Chuck?
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Are you a ghost now? Did you die? Now?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
I just thought if there was two josh is in here,
I feel a little left out.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Oh I see and ganged up on.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, I just I had no clever way to say it.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Ghost host, You're right about that.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
My mouth is working today, my brain.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
That's all right. It's been a long week already. It's
only Tuesday, really right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Is it just me?
Speaker 1 (01:24):
No, it's been a long week.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
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?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Yes, it's it'sy okay, rhymes with tutsy. I saw someone
put it. I think are good friends at Smithsonian Magazine.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Yeah, it's ittsy. There's a bit of an R in there.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Yeah, I like ittsy all right, like Tutsy Rollsy the
Dead Mummy. It'sy.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
This is a good one. This is exciting. I've been
wanting to do one on this one too.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Sure, I'm sure that's where that comes from.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, really like in the past few days even.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah. I've been interested in this since I saw the
facial reconstruction photos. I was like, or's he was Jack Palance?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Chris Christophferson?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Is that?
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Okay, dude, A little bit of both.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
No, it's like they said, mister Christophferson, please come in
so we can.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Remember, Yeah, look there's Chris Christofferson kidding, that's it'sy.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah, I mean it's me and Bobby McGee right there.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Exactly Did you see that Ken Burns documentary?
Speaker 2 (03:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
So good.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Oh wow, PBS gives it away for free.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
What do you got some PBS connection?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
No, it was on PBS for a while.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Oh do you have cable or something? See, I don't
have I don't.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Even think you have to have cable. Oh you mean
like like you just stream? Yes, you're you're up the creek.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
I'm gonna buy it. Though it looks great.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
It's not worth more than forty five, but go ahead
and pay.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
That right because it goes to Kim Burn's hairdresser.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
That's right, And that's quite a collection of brushes that
that person has to maintain.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
But Chris Christophferson is interviewed like today, Oh interesting, he
looks exactly like let's see now.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
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?
Speaker 1 (04:51):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
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
(05:12):
in this office. It would have been pretty special. Yeah,
but I'm no ken Burns. No, who is ken Burns?
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah? That's true.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
All right, let's talk. Should we take a break.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Whoa ninety one. I'm in college. It's a salad days.
I'm wearing a Flavor Flave clock around my neck.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Nice. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah, that's
all I have to say about that.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
No, I'm saying, you shouldn't have admitted that you didn't work.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Now, I know, okay, but no one believe that. You know,
I'm not that cool, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I tried to get Chuck D on movie Crushed Too.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Did he play the City Winery?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
No? But he lives in Atlanta.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Oh, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
And at least part time.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Boy did he say?
Speaker 2 (06:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I gotcha.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
But Chuck d if you're listening upon City Market, let's come,
let's talk about your favorite movie.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Right, and also shout out to Chris Christophferson's manager.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
That's right, of course.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
All right, boy, we're gonna have to go back and
edit all this out. Now.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
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
(07:30):
a corpse.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
And you were like what I was, because we are
there too, right yeah, And I said.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
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
(07:56):
of pictures and go down and tell somebody who owns
like the nearest line.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Right, and on the way down, you and I are
going like, that was not a hiker that was recently killed.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
No, even I knew that, Like, did you see that guy?
Speaker 2 (08:07):
He was super old.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
And the Simons were not crazy, but I'm sure they
were saying the same thing. They were just out of
your shot.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
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,
(08:41):
it's just like some hiker or whatever. It will be fine.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Put him in a wooden casket.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
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,
(09:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Here for sure. And what they found out was this
body hi frozen body.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever, five thousand years old.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
That's the same like same little bit as when.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
He goes moon Pie had time to be Abe. That
was Abe's buddy. What's his name?
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Oh? Man, it'll come to me later, I'll say it.
People are screaming out there. I canture beer fill cos
right now.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Oh what is it?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
I want to say, like Chauncey or Chalmers? Is not
that something very similar to that? Honestly? Look it up.
Speaker 2 (10:01):
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
(10:24):
four thousand years old, at the very least.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What's abes friends name, Jasper Beery Lasper?
Speaker 2 (10:30):
Yeah, of course. So they nicknamed them Utsy because of
the region of the oats, all Alps. Very cute little
name it is.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Other people call him frozen Fritz. Oh really yeah, I
like it's the way more.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, Ootsy's nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
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
(11:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
Or died where he fell.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
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
(12:25):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
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
(12:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
It was all really cool when you look at the
shoes and the bear skin hat and right, it's very cool.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum
of Natural History display, but it was real, right, you.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Know, well put chuck. You know who would have loved
that analogy? Chris Christopher's.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
It's not going to say either Jasper or Artsy.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
You never know.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
I'm like using reverse they call his manager right now.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
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
(14:42):
didn't happen because he kind of fell in this crevass,
all five to two one hundred and thirty four pounds
of him.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Yeah, which is one hundred and fifty eight centimeters and
sixty one kilograms.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
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
(15:16):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
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
(16:26):
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
(16:48):
he died with, yeah, and him himself.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
He also interestingly had sixty one tattoos all over his body.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Chuck, I've been waiting for this day. What you said
tattoos correctly?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Oh you mean the tattoos.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
I mean I shouldn't say anything.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
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
(17:28):
maybe three identical lines, short lines like an inch long,
or like a cross, not a spiritual religious cross, but
you know.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Like a plus sign, yeah, or like a Chinese character
that has some inspirational association, right, perseverance or something.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
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
(18:09):
mark or it might have been the acupuncture treatment itself.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Sure, so you.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
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
(19:28):
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
(19:48):
shifted over the years since he was discovered, and it
still is. It's still malleable. Nothing is definitive, nothing said
in nice.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
All right, let's take a break. It's a bad joke.
We'll talk about uh Ertsy's health, right for this. Was
(20:23):
he healthy?
Speaker 1 (20:25):
I mean he was.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, exactly, no doctors, no dentists. So as you would imagine,
he had gum disease, heart disease, lime disease, gall bladderstone,
hardened arteries, gallstones.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Yeah, the disorder is so nice. We named it twice.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded people for decades.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
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
(22:07):
and hadn't digested it. He had food in his in
his colon, he had food in his intestines.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Yes, and slow plums. I don't know why that wasn't mentioned.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
He can get that same meal in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
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?
Speaker 2 (22:54):
Slow plums?
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, that they make slow gin from? Oh really, which
I've never had, have you?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
That's sloe right?
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah right, It's like supposedly a very tart, kind of
bitterish plum, but it was it's like load of vitamins.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
I've never had it. And remember it seemed like an
old person. Drink was a slow jin fizz.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Like an old person who's like one hundred and fifty
years old.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yes, when I lived in Arizona, there were all the
snowbirds were down there. They drink like slowjin fizzs.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
Get a couple of slow gin phizzies.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Stat make it a double.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
I guarantee you there's a bar in this dumb building
that has slow jin pzzis on the venue.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Sure you know with arm guards? Can I keep the
arm guard comes with a drink.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
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,
(24:08):
but not one without conflict, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Sure, based on his meals, well.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
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
(24:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Yeah, yeah, have you ever noticed, yes, yep.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
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
(25:21):
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
(25:44):
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
(26:06):
of them.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, like just ahead of them were like real deal
Italians out there. Yeah, bacon bagets.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Yeah, well that's French.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah, what I mean Italian bread?
Speaker 1 (26:17):
Yeah? Yeah, in Italy they just call him bread.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
By Alexander McQueen.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Oh man, I wouldn't say that.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I know. That was amazing, so good.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
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
(27:05):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Well, and he was Italian, that's right, So you know
Italians in their fashion go hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
I love it. Everyone who's been to Millino knows that,
or fearensy.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
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
(28:05):
they were onto something.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
A little bit of extraff really does it and the
big hair.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, they were great guys. So we met some cool
Italian dudes.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
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
(28:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Yeah, they all had their specialties. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Yeah, it's a really cool time.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
Yeah, it's really cool. This is a really interesting period
I think of human development.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
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
(29:48):
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,
(30:09):
Like he didn't bleed out from that or anything like that.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
No, huh. So it makes you think, well, what did
kill him then?
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Right, Well, they think that might have been from a fight.
Perhaps that wound.
Speaker 1 (30:18):
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
(30:39):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Yeah, because they were like, he's a founder on our side. Yeah,
like it just to barely I think.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
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
(31:26):
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
(31:48):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
Right, which weren't necessarily right, as it turns out, no, but.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
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,
(32:40):
and they said that it looks like things might have
moved around some.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
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?
Speaker 2 (33:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (33:58):
You're looking at my wife, right, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (34:01):
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
(34:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Yeah, that they were just a little bent.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
Yeah, from like after his death.
Speaker 1 (34:53):
Probably from the push of ice, the pressure from ice
feezing on him.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
Again exactly'll that'll crack your ribs in a second, or
binga ribs.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
The big one, though, was what they found in the
X ray in two thousand and one.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Right, you know what they found? Should we take a break?
Oh yeah, all right, we'll discover what they found right
after this.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Where did they find Chuck?
Speaker 2 (35:33):
They found a freaking arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, back shoulder.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
That was a verbatim quote from the press conference. This
was a big deal.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
It's a triangle.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
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.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
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
(36:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
Message for you, sir.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, it's good shot.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
It was a punk move, is what it was. It was.
Speaker 1 (37:20):
Here's the thing, because his possessions were left intact and
because he had that defensive wound.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Yeah, they think that this was.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Here. We reached the point where the historians and the
archaeologists are like, we really can't say, but here are
some ideas.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Sure he was trained in history.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
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
(38:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
I think. So you're not going with my jealous lover theory.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
No, okay, no, I'm not all right.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
I think it was a woman with that arrow.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
You think the woman a woman shot him?
Speaker 2 (39:05):
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
(39:27):
and forges an arrow, and then in that time it
took her to forge that arrow from hardened molten you know, flint.
Speaker 1 (39:37):
Flint shirt chirt.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
He's up that hill a little bit and she's like,
no problem, watch this right in the back.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
So, speaking of that chirt, he did not have he
didn't have blanks.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, so this is evidence that he didn't know how
to create his own tools.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, somebody applicate these tools, which apparently were sort of
on their last legs.
Speaker 1 (40:10):
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
(40:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
It's a but he owes me money.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
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?
Speaker 1 (41:15):
This is what I saw that it made me say
it's time.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
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
(41:39):
would have been on the side of the mountain if
not for him.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
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
(42:03):
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,
(42:25):
so that's a big problem for him right there.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
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
(42:49):
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
(43:11):
hop hornbeam and that's stuff from lower altitudes.
Speaker 1 (43:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
Throw out the autumn theory.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Yep, So they say he definitely died in the summer,
right and spring.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
Right where he was found dead. And they figured all
this out. They retraced all this just from those spores
and mosses.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Amazing, they think.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Because he's like the little lady always needs a few
days to cool off.
Speaker 1 (44:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, you can also wrap meat in it, right apparently.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
To I guess, keep it or whatever. But also they
may he may have wrapped his hand in it or
something as well.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Or maybe when he saw a doctor.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Pretty good meal, not bad.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
That Mountain's that's what most people guess.
Speaker 2 (45:28):
Yeah, so he was probably scared.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:43):
And he was old for the time.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Sure, and he had ginger vitis.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:00):
Not married but related to Utsy.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah. Pretty neat.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
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.
Speaker 1 (46:31):
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
(46:51):
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
(47:15):
he was killed ritually and buried in this.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Oh so they think the killing was a ritual killing too,
a sacrificial killing. Yeah, oh I didn't get that part.
Speaker 1 (47:24):
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
(47:46):
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
(48:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:19):
He also had some ornamentation too, didn't he Yeah, like
a marble bead, Yeah, which you know could mean something
or could not.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:31):
Just send him into the afterlife with all the things
he would need.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
But they found no like chemical preservation, no evidence or anything.
Speaker 1 (48:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:14):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (49:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
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?
Speaker 1 (49:41):
I was thinking exactly, here's how that happens.
Speaker 2 (49:44):
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
(50:04):
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
(50:26):
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,
(50:48):
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
(51:09):
at the finish line and the speed skating oval. Oh,
that's nat Yeah, it's pretty cool. He cine picture.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
It's like urban exploration Iron Range.
Speaker 2 (51:17):
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
(51:39):
you are iron Man. When he crossed the finish line.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
That's awesome. They have Ozzie singing it. I would I
would too.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
Who else I don't know.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
I guess theo could again.
Speaker 2 (51:50):
That is John Potoniac. Dio is dead, Oh is he? Yeah,
Ronnie James Dio's passed on. When within the last couple
of years.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:15):
Fingers comes your arms. Yeah, it's really neat.
Speaker 1 (52:19):
It is.
Speaker 2 (52:21):
I saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest
tattoo I've ever seen.
Speaker 1 (52:23):
I think it might be. It's pretty Hats off to
Chris Christofferson's manager, who actually is the person with that that?
Speaker 2 (52:29):
That's right?
Speaker 1 (52:30):
Uh. If you want to get in touch with us,
like who is that?
Speaker 2 (52:34):
John Patoniac?
Speaker 1 (52:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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