How an Ancient Mummy Changed History

A couple is exploring the Alps, the highest and most extensive mountain range in central Europe. They are seasoned hikers. They like to venture off the beaten path and explore lesserk known routes, so they take a shortcut through the snow.

Suddenly, they spot something strange protruding from the ice. Something brown. The closer they get, the clearer it becomes what they've just stumbled upon.

a dead body. The couple assumes it must be the remains of some lost mountaineer who suffered a fatal accident. They hike back to a refuge and tell the landlord about their discovery.

The man notifies the authorities. At this point, no one realizes that the two hikers have just accidentally discovered one of the oldest mummies in the world. It will become one of the most extraordinary archaeological finds in history because this man comes right from the copper age.

For thousands of years, his body lay frozen in the ice, almost perfectly preserved. It will reveal incredible secrets from a long-forgotten era. We modeled the mummy in realistic detail to show you.

It tells tales of a life marked by hardship, bitter conflicts, and an unsolved murder mystery. Fern. 4 days later, a recovery team sets out to extract the body.

They use a jackhammer and ice pigs to chip the body out of the ice. It's a male corpse. [Music] The body is placed in a rescue bag and flown by helicopter to the nearby village of Vent, Austria.

A mortician is already wathing on the ground with a hearse. The body doesn't fit in the coffin. So they break his arm and force the lid shut.

They drive the body to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Insuk, Austria. An archaeologist is called in to take a closer look at the corpse. And the expert soon realizes this body is old.

Like really old. The body is in remarkably good condition. It's what scientists call a wet mummy, meaning the body was mummified naturally in the glacier ice.

The bones, tissue, and even internal organs are relatively well preserved. No one has ever seen a mummy quite like this before. The researchers go straight to work.

The mystery of this case will keep them busy for decades. Who was this man? When exactly did he live?

And how did he die? Finds like this make you realize what humans were already capable of thousands of years ago. Around the same time the mystery man in the ice died, people in Mesopotamia and Egypt were inventing writing.

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Just head to grammarly. com/fern to download Grammarly to test some of these features. The body is 1 m 54 long and weighs about 13 kilos.

Judging by his feet, he'd wear European size 38 shoes today. The Iceman appears to be seriously inked. There are a total of 61 tattoos scattered across his body.

All of them are simple lines and crosses. They're located here, here, here, and down here. His teeth are worn down, his wisdom teeth missing.

His lungs are blackened with suit. His arteries are hardened, and he has three gstones. He broke his nose at least once in his life and suffered multiple fractured ribs.

The position of his legs suggests he may have been knocked. DNA analysis will later reveal he had blood type O positive and was probably lactose intolerant. His cholesterol levels were high and he had been infected with Lyme disease from a tick bite.

Even his equipment is remarkably well preserved. He carried small wooden containers, weapons, all sorts of tools, and some functional clothing. All signs point to one conclusion.

This man lived in the Copper Age. He must have been lying in the ice for more than 5,300 years. He's a short king by modern European standards.

Has brown eyes and medium length brown hair, or at least he used to. By now, he's gone completely bald. He's wearing goat leather leggings and a long fur coat.

His head is covered by a bare skin cap. His shoes are made of leather and bast fibers. He has stuffed him with grass to keep his feet warm.

He's wearing a kind of backpack loaded with all his belongings. The man is exhausted and breathing heavily because he's on the run. He has walked all the way from what is now the Vinskow Valley in South Tyrone.

His roots lie even further south. His ancestors came from Anatolia in modernday Turkey. He's been on the move for days.

But now he's taking a break. He pulls two birch bark containers from his wooden backpack. Inside are hot embers he has wrapped in maple leaves to keep them smoldering for hours.

It's basically a stone age fire starter. He sits by the fire and enjoys a simple meal. dried ibeck meat and grain porridge.

He also chews on some bracken fern. The plant is toxic, but he's suffering from severe stomach pain and is trying to ease it however he can. The man is in pretty rough shape.

He has been dealing with constant diarrhea caused by some nasty whipworm parasites he picked up a while ago. On top of that, he's itching all over. He's got fleas.

His teeth are a mess, too. He has cavities, gum disease, and a rotten front tooth. His feet, which have carried him all this way, are also in quite bad shape.

One toe has already suffered frostbite and he's got a fungal infection. But all those ailments are peanuts compared to the deep cut on his right hand. Just days ago, the man got into a fight and did not walk away unscathed.

Now he inspects his tools and weapons. His bow is still working, but several arrows are missing from his deer skin quiver. He might have lost them while fleeing.

Now he's trying to carve new ones, but his tools are worn down and he's struggling. He also carries a dagger with a wooden handle and a flintstone blade. Next to that, a versatile copper axe that can be used both as a woodworking tool and a deadly weapon.

He carefully sharpens them with a special sharpening tool. It's been a while since he has met someone who wished him well, and he has been wandering through the Alps ever since, completely alone and isolated. Always running, fleeing, physically and probably emotionally drained.

But he won't be alone much longer. The people chasing him have caught up. Now there's a Flintstone arrow head lodged between his shoulder and second rib, 27 mm long and 18 mm wide.

It has pierced an artery. He is losing a lot of blood and his blood pressure drops. Within minutes, he slips into unconsciousness.

The man dies at around 46 years old, right here, high up in the Zstal Alps. Thousands of years later, his place of death will give him his now legendary name, Etsy. Entire civilizations rise and fall.

But Etsy stays right where he is, frozen in time, perfectly preserved in the ice until one day, some 5,000 years later, a couple of hikers stumbles across his body. Etsy is one of the most important discoveries in archaeological history. Unlike most other prehistoric mummies, he wasn't buried in some elaborate ritual.

He wasn't carefully laid to rest with symbolic gifts. His life was cut short abruptly, violently. But his body and tools provide us with something very unique, a glimpse into the last minutes before his death.

a window to the life of a real person from the copper age. We'll probably never know who killed him, but his body tells a far bigger story about the diseases, diet, and tools of our ancestors. Etsy greatly expanded our knowledge of this period in human history.

Thanks to him, we now know that some early humans traveled far greater distances than we thought, that copper tools were already in widespread use, and that infections like Lyme disease have been around for a long, long time. Today, Etsy is the most thoroughly studied mummy in the world, and science is far from done with him. Researchers keep adding new pieces to the puzzle, hoping that one day they will be able to unlock even more insights into his immune system, a more detailed look at his brain.

At first, Austria claimed the mummy was theirs, but a border survey revealed that Usie had died just a few meters on the Italian side. Today, he rests in a high-tech cooling chamber at the Museum of Archaeology in Balsano. His preservation is a full-time job.

His body is kept at a constant -6° C and almost 100% humidity. It has to be sprayed with sterile water every 2 months to prevent it from losing moisture. Meanwhile, scientists are constantly working on new preservation techniques to ensure Etsy can be seen and studied for generations to come.

For a long time, experts thought his incredible condition was a lucky fluke. that a sudden shift in climate had flesh frozen his body and locked him in ice forever. Today, we know that's not entirely true.

Etsy's body hasn't been constantly sealed. The ice around him melted and refro again and again, which means there might be more out there. Other ancient humans still resting somewhere high up in the glaciers, waiting to be found, waiting to reveal the next chapter in the story of where we came from.