Otzi and his hunting buddies were sitting around the fire, finishing up a nice dinner.
Suddenly another group of hunters attacks.
Otzi is the first hit and one of his friends rolls him over to try to save him and pull out the arrow.
They can’t hold off the other hunters and run for their lives.
The other hunters follow those guys, leaving Otzi (the first shot) left at the scene and nobody ever returns.
The End
BTW, I read that he had some pretty decent shoes, and they used grass as sort of socks/insulation at the time. Interesting concept - shoe filler.
There was no mention of the blood on his weapons on the NOVA show. Not saying it isn’t true, but wasn’t mentioned in that show. Got a cite? Pinker may claim he was a member of a raiding party, but the NOVA show was talking to the people in charge of the museum display, and they didn’t think it was conclusive at all, and actually spun the theory of murder for personal motives based upon the copper axe being left and the arrow being removed - no identifiers to connect the killer to the body.
No, he lay where he fell, except perhaps rolled over. He was draped across a boulder, not flat on the ground. His right arm is at a strange angle across his chest/neck, suggesting he was rolled over. The body was found way way way up on an icy alpine mountain ridge, nowhere near an encampment or settlement. Pollen in his body shows signs he had been up and down the mountain a couple times. He had within the last hour or so eaten a decent-sized meal. He was in possession of a copper axe, but his body was dated to before Europeans were thought to be able to smelt copper. (This is a huge find just for that detail - it adjusts the record of when copper was replacing stone.)
The rarity of worked copper makes that axe immensly valuable to that culture. Someone removed the arrow shaft - the head got lodged in his chest. They had the opportunity to take valuables, including the axe. So there needs to be a plausible explanation for that. The murder explanation seems more plausible to me than an attack on a group that migrated and so no one rummaged the body.
Again, the blood thing I haven’t seen evidence for. But even if the axe had just been used to cleave my father’s head, I would think it would be a fitting trophy that I had avenged my father, especially given how valuable it had to be.
His shoes were interesting. They appeared to be a lattice of rope holding a skin of some kind, stuffed with leaves and plant matter.
Quite apart from the murder, I find it fascinating just the description of why his body survived for so long. At that altitude, the cold and dry air mummified the body fairly quickly. Then snowfall covered the body. If it had been anywhere else, the movement of the snow and ice would have ground the body to bits as it migrated down the mountain. But the specific place he died was in a small boulder-filled gulley. The gulley made just enough of a depression that the ice that filled in the low spot was anchored by the obstructing rocks, so it did not slide down as the snow and ice above it slid over the top. The weight crushed his mummified body to a distorted flattened shape, which also shifted his internal organs oddly. Eventually the body became exposed, and was discovered by two mountain hikers who got off their trail.
Go to Middlebury, Vermont. Visit the local cemetery. You will find a gravestone with the following inscription:
Ashes of Amum-Her-Khepesh-Ef
Aged Two Years
Son of Sen Woset 3rd
King of Egypt and his wife
Hathor-Hotpe
1883 BC
Yes, there is an Egyptian mummy that is buried in a small town in Vermont. A local museum bought the mummy back in 1886. But when it was delivered they found it wasn’t in good enough condition to display. So it was put into storage in the museum’s attic.
Another curator, George Mead, came across the mummy in 1945. He said, “This was once a human being. It is fitting and proper that it should have a Christian burial.” So he had the remains of Amum-Her-Khepesh-Ef cremated and buried in the Mead family plot.
I have sen the amazingly well-preserved bodies of Swedish soldiers from the 30 Years’ War in the basement of a cathedral in Bremen, Germany. IIRC, the lead lining played a role in the preservation. Some of them looked none too happy about being killed.
Problem with that theory is that the arrow left its head behind inside Otzi, so was useless as a weapon. The natural thing to do would have been to toss it away when the killer saw it was broken, not take it.
That’s cool. I wonder what the poor copper age fellow would have thought if he’d known that, 5,000 years in the future, a picture of his withered corpse would be the decoration on a pop-cultural icon.
I heard or read the other day that latest speculation is that the arrow wound was old and he died after falling down while trying to climb up the mountain.
Maybe he did and it floated away the next spring thaw.
It is a pity they went digging for the damned arrow head instead of trying to figure out if it was an old healed wound or not.
Though I like the killed by someone in the tribe, so they had to leave the ax behind because there would be questions…
Hey, didn’t you go hiking with Otzi and come back to tell us he decided to stay over there with that other tribe? Then why do you have his stuff…:dubious:
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