Posted on 04/08/2019 12:06:47 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Broken arrows and worn stone gear speak to the plight of the ancient alpine hunter.
Before his violent death 5,300 years ago, the man known as Ötzi the Iceman was carrying all the essentials, from bark storage containers to an axe. Now, an analysis suggests that many of his stone tools were old and worn, hinting at the travails of the iceman's final hours.
Ursula Wierer at the provincial Department of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape in Florence, Italy, and her colleagues examined artefacts found in the Alps near Ötzi's mummified remains. His stone knife was well worn and his stone arrowheads were broken, and he lacked blanks to make new ones.
Earlier examination of Ötzi's remains revealed a deep, recent stab wound to his right hand. That might have left him unable to care for his kit -- marks on the Iceman's tools suggest that he was right-handed, the authors say.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
He hid out in an ice cave, went to sleep or passed out from exhaustion, and never woke up.
He may have been fleeing from some farmer that had a daughter....................
He was shot in the back with an arrow.
http://www.iceman.it/en/the-mummy/
http://www.iceman.it/en/the-iceman/
Doesn’t look a hella lot worse for wear than some of my stuff after a long camping trip.
Excellent close-up photographs!......................
Well, if it had been MY daughter I would have shot him in the back too!.................
;^)
We visited the museum last year. Amazing, how much of his kit and clothing was preserved.
Albert Collins owns the Iceman spot in my pantheon.
Wait a minute.
Are you saying that you've actually bought a tool/instrument from Harbor Freight that actually STARTED OUT sharp, then went dull?
How can this be?
Everything I've ever purchased from HF was dull as melted wax before I got out the door with it.
Pure, unadulterated and unapologetically Chinese-made CRAP...all of it.
I refuse to buy anything from that place, ever again.
But your point was well-made.
(See what I did there?)
Sounds like a great place to visit!
Maybe he was a hut-to-hut salesman, peddling knapped flint tools, and he was robbed for his inventory; the thieves looked at the warranty failures he was carrying and left them.
The biggest difference between Otzi and all of us is that he didn’t have a smart phone. His behavior was human and no doubt had a personality that we would recognize immediately. Some of his neighbors were satisfied to live their lives inside the village, rarely leaving the comfort and security that it offered. Others were loners and made their living hunting, gathering, and making long distance trading ventures. Those people may not have been liked by the villagers and may have been distrusted. I suspect that such dust ups experienced by Otzi wasn’t that rare. The villages needed people like Otzi to bring exotic goods, information of what was going on on the other side of the mountain, and bring new technology. Did he commit a transgression? Perhaps.
Could be lol.
But seriously for a sec...
Tools made of wood, hide, self made glue and chipped rocks are gonna wear out a lot faster than today’s factory made, store bought stuff.
That such ancient tools would wear out to little more than marginally useful and had to be patch repaired multiple times before a trip ended really shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Might have got somone’s wife pregnant while the husband was out on a long hunt...
The point in the photo has definitely been resharpened [new flakes driven off the edge], but that’s not unusual on a hafted tool. Making a blade dos not take near as much time as hafting it so there is a lot of incentive to “use up” a hafted tool until there’s not enough left to sharpen; in the course of such usage the function of the tool may change; an old blade may be better suited to prying open mussels or skinning than a new one, or even burnishing. The ideal tool for cutting, say hides, isn’t a well worked blade but simply a flake knocked off of a chert or obsidian core, esp. one with a hook to it.
He tried to send for help on his Blackberry, but it was an actual blackberry.
He appears to have been a hunter-gatherer, maybe there was a violent split at that time between hunters and gatherers, due to some polarizing political figure. /s
Prehistoric Disaster: An Alpine Pompeii from the Stone Age
Der Spiegel | Friday, October 10, 2008 | Matthias Schulz
Posted on 10/11/2008 1:51:16 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2103309/posts
Very true. All of those are possibilities as to what brought about his demise. It’s amazing what they have so far discovered from his remains. They’ve actually found living descendants based on his DNA.
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