Arise, Sir Loin of Beef
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 ...
Thanks for posting! I would have missed this.
Vegetarian = Bad Hunter.
or is purloin the sirloin on cats?
LOL, I plan to steal that. But of course, my posts are *littered* with such things.
My pleasure. I'd had it in a file for a few weeks, and just today finally got around to checking whether it had been posted (it's a year-old article), so, basically, I'd missed it myself. :^).
Yeah, I give you that...but the crap metal they use to make them with...wow!
I had a friend that did a direct swap with a Honda engine on a lawn mower with one from HF.
Everything bolted right up.
Out of curiosity on his first oil change, I put one of those donut magnets out of an old microwave in the old oil...two days later it looked like it had grown a half inch of fur.
There were no shavings or metal pieces, but the amount of wear was just amazing.
I'll be surprised if he gets one more season out of it.
But then it was only like $279 bucks or so, compared to well over $1500 for the Honda.
You gets what you pays for.
Seems well tanned to be living in the Alps.
Ran across this history bit the other day.
Sir Loin of Beef
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On86yB00ET0&t=0s
“Those 99 dollar engines are awesome.”
See youtube etc for good commentary on those HF lawnmower engines. When new run them for one hour. Flush out all the oil that will have tons of ChiCom shavings. Put in new oil. Then you are pretty much OK.
Many ideas of why he was fleeing have been raised. No one has mentioned that one thing he was carrying was a very well made copper tool that was fairly large. IN earlier readings I gained the impression that it was a fine large copper tool perhaps a ceremonial knife, and people wondered why he was carrying it. Perhaps he stole it from a village or host. Perhaps he was taking it somewhere to deliver or sell and people wanted to steal it from him. Anyway, that’s my Sherlock guess. It’s my bedtime, can some one else find a picture of this artifact and post it. Actually, I don’t know how to transfer images I find elsewhere to FR.
Copper axe
Ötzi’s axe was preserved intact and is the only one of its kind in the world. The blade consists of 99.7% pure copper and is trapezoidal in shape. The knee haft is made from yew and is approx. 60 cm long. The copper blade is fixed into the forked shaft of the haft with birch tar and is tightly bound with leather straps to hold it firmly in place. The blade was cast in a mould, cooled and then compressed by hammering. Signs of wear show that the axe had been frequently used and therefore had to be re-sharpened. The copper used in the blade does not derive from the Alpine region but from Central Italy. Researchers have discovered that the metal had been obtained from ore mined in South Tuscany.
Status symbol, weapon or tool?
Copper was the first metal to be used to make weapons and tools. Mining and smelting skills spread from Asia Minor to Central Europe 4000 years BC. Around 3000 BC, high-ranking men owned a copper axe, which was often buried with them. A copper axe was used not only for woodworking and felling trees but was also a powerful close-combat weapon. Was Ötzi a tribal leader? It remains a mystery why the attacker didn’t take this valuable copper axe. Would it have exposed him as a murderer? ============================================================== http://www.iceman.it/en/equipment/
I’ve got 3 on go karts. It’s easy duty, they’ll run forever.
I’d be interested to see how durable they are when run hard like a gen set or pressure washer.
If he was killed for that tool, wouldn’t the killers have taken that tool?
Another one for the list. :^)
He was not killed by his attackers. He was mortally wounded, but escaped and died in the snowy mountains after he ran away from them. They probably did want the ax. The question is whether it was his, a trade object, or something he stole from those who attacked him.
That’s another thing I find difficult to believe.
He ran away and died... from hunters... who shot him with an arrow.
Hunters, accustomed to tracking down animals wounded by their arrows through forests and woods, couldn’t track down a guy in a mountain pass.
Yeah. I don’t see that happening.
It is very hard to track animals in the middle of a snow storm, especially if they got a head start. Here is a scenario. Otzi is packed and ready to travel. Has his gear, spare food, weapons, etc. Someone wants to get his stuff, for any one of several reasons. They shoot him with an arrow, but he runs off into the woods. The shooter is not dressed or equipped for a hunt. He runs for his buddies, they have to get on their cold weather gear and pick up food and weapons. It takes a while to get organized so even if they track him for a while, it gets dark and they can no longer follow. It is still snowing, so even if they camped overnight it was almost impossible to find and follow a trail especially when he was up in the rocks and craigs. So he traveled as far as he could, then collapsed and was covered by snow, and thus never found. Wasn’t he in a depression where he ended up frozen for 5,000 years.
I don’t buy it.
I think what really happened is Otzi stumbled into some information damaging to stone age Hillary and ended up suicide-ing himself with an arrow to the back.
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