Cecil Adams, fount of all wisdom and cosmic knowledge, some years ago did a column on the Neolithic man frozen in the ice of the Otztal Alps on the Austria-Italy border and nicknamed Otzi, and the allegation that he was in fact gay, as evidenced by preserved semen found in his rectal cavity.
He quite ably demonstrated that the latter allegation was the work of an April Fools story perpetrated by gay Viennese publication Lambda Nachtrichten, picked up as a “straight” story (you’ll pardon the experession) by Der Spiegel, and thence distributed to news media worldwide.
However, Cecil’s refutation is founded on one significant error, understandable in the light of the information available at the time. (Though Cecil knows all, he is no doubt unaware of the mating customs of the alien race o a planet somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy – his knowledge extends only as far as the limits of human knowledge. And hence erroneous data reported by reputable media can indeed lead even Cecil astray.)
In the course of my wife’s professional reading in anthropology, she came across the thorough analysis prepared for the popular press by Konrad Schindler, the archaeologist who was involved with the Otzi find from the beginning. This included a detailed analysis of every possession Otzi had with him when he was frozen, which we have started referring to between ourselves as “Spindler’s List,” and a thorough account of Otzi’s preserved anatomy.
Remembering Cecil’s column, I of course decided to find out whether any reference to the Lambda Nachtrichten hoax was in there (it was) and what the status of Otzi’s privy parts was, as detailed by a professional in the field.
Cecil stated in his column, based on available reports to date:
In point of fact, this is in error. There appears to be no damage by scavengers or any external instruments of decay (bacteria, fungi, etc.) due to the body’s having been covered by snow, later compacted to ice, immediately after death, and not having been exposed again for about 5,000 years until its discovery in 1991. The body was, in fact, a frozen mummy, substantially dessicated by loss of water over the years, but intact, right down to eyeballs, tattoos, and other peripheral body parts and conditions.
The left buttock and anus of the mummy were inadvertently destroyed by a power chisel used by the search-and-rescue squad to attempt to remove it from the ice, when it was thought that Otzi was actually a 20th Century corpse lost in a mountaineering accident. The body is otherwise effectively intact, including the presence of penis and scrotum. The latter is described as having dimensions of six centimeters by six centimeters; the penis, shrunken by fluid loss, is five centimeters long, relatively large at the base. Even the remnant of a foreskin is present. No testicles could be found by palpation, and the researchers are loath to do any invasive research, since the danger of contamination is great and Otzi is a one-of-a-kind specimen. In addition, there are ethical questions about how far one may go in examining him as a scientific specimen, rather than considering him an ancestor whose corpse deserves respect. Spindler suggests that dessication may have led to extreme flattening of the testicles, making them undetectable by palpation, or they may have undergone autolysis (dissolving through the breakdown of their own component tissues), as is fairly common with the endocrine glands of mummies.
But to summarize: Otzi’s genitalia are intact, if shriveled. (You try spending 5,000 years in a glacier and see what it does to yours! :)) His anal region was destroyed, not by scavengers, but by human error at the time of his rediscovery.
Except for these minor errors (which are clearly based on early and fragmentary technical reports), Cecil’s column was proven accurate in all regards.
