Speaker 1: Cuckoo Seattle. We're coming to see you. Yes, and your
Speaker 1: little horn announcement is one of my favorite things that
Speaker 1: you do because I know it means we're going to
Speaker 1: do a live show, and in this case, we're going
Speaker 1: to the great state of Washington, the greatest city in
Speaker 1: the United States, Seattle, at the greatest theater in the world.
Speaker 1: The more the more we're going back. It's like our
Speaker 1: home away from home in Seattle. We're going to be
Speaker 1: there Thursday, January, and tickets are already on sale and
Speaker 1: they're going like like uh Washington hotcakes, which is fast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're going like chew car cherries. And you know what,
Speaker 1: you want to save the few bucks, I think you
Speaker 1: can even go to the box office there buy them
Speaker 1: without those internet fees. Yes, Or if you don't care
Speaker 1: and you just want to buy them on the internet,
Speaker 1: you can go to s y s K live dot
Speaker 1: com and follow the links there and it will take
Speaker 1: you right to the beautiful ticket site. And also, f
Speaker 1: y I, if you go to buy tickets in person,
Speaker 1: you want to go to the box office of the
Speaker 1: Paramount Theater downtown, not the more the Paramount. We'll see
Speaker 1: you guys in January. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know,
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey,
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, and
Speaker 1: there's guest producer Josh over there, which makes this Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know all inclusive, and guest ghost host Chuck.
Speaker 1: Are you a ghost? Now? Did you die? No? I
Speaker 1: just thought if there was two josh is in here,
Speaker 1: I feel a little left out. Oh I see and
Speaker 1: ganged up on. Yeah, I just I had no clever
Speaker 1: way to say it. Ghost host, You're right about that.
Speaker 1: My mouth is working today, my brain, that's all right.
Speaker 1: It's been a long week already. It's only Tuesday, really, right,
Speaker 1: is it just me? No, it's been a long week.
Speaker 1: I mean today's like I know, I don't want to complain.
Speaker 1: Never mind, everything's great. Hey, let me ask you something.
Speaker 1: Does OATSI have a noom loud or not? Yes, it's
Speaker 1: it's okay. It rhymes with tutsie. I saw someone put it.
Speaker 1: I think are good friends at Smithsonian Magazine. It's there's
Speaker 1: a bit of an R in there. Yeah. I like,
Speaker 1: let's see alright, like Tutsie roll the dead Mummy. Let's see.
Speaker 1: This is a good one. This is exciting. I've been
Speaker 1: wanting to do one on this one too. I had to.
Speaker 1: But in what spurned spurned or spurred? Spurned is where
Speaker 1: you say get away and spurs like go ahead? Okay, nice,
Speaker 1: Yeah that makes sense because you're using your spurs spurred. Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that's where that comes from. Surely, Okay, we
Speaker 1: chuck just blew my mind? Uh what spurred this was there?
Speaker 1: Let's see made some news recently because they managed to
Speaker 1: trace his last like day and a half, really like
Speaker 1: in the past few days even, Yeah, and about fifty
Speaker 1: three years ago. He had the same thoughts that we
Speaker 1: had when we started this podcast. He's like, it's only
Speaker 1: Tuesday and this has been a long night already, a long, deadly,
Speaker 1: bloody week. Yeah. I've been interested in this since I
Speaker 1: saw the facial reconstruction photos. I was like, let's he
Speaker 1: was Jack Palance Chris Christofferson? Is that? Okay dude? A
Speaker 1: little bit of both. No, It's like they said, Mr Christofferson,
Speaker 1: please come in so we can. Well, now that I
Speaker 1: think about it, Christofferson and Jack Palance are have some similarities.
Speaker 1: If you put a beard on Jack Palance, really yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: squinty eyes. Yeah, I guess sound this sh face. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess you could see both. Christofferson, Man, what a legend. Remember, yeah,
Speaker 1: look there's Chris Christofferson kidding. That's let's see. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's me and Bobby McGee right there. Exactly did
Speaker 1: you see that Ken Burns documentary? Now I didn't not yet.
Speaker 1: You haven't yet. Still No, I went to buy it
Speaker 1: the other day and I just have not yet. So good.
Speaker 1: He's gonna buy that stuff, right, yeah, all right. I
Speaker 1: just didn't know if there was a work around and
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, no, dude, here's what you do. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'll buy it. It's like t Bucks. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: PBS gives it away for free. What do you got
Speaker 1: some PBS connection? No, it was on PBS for a while.
Speaker 1: Oh do you have cable or something? See, I don't
Speaker 1: have I don't even think you have to have cable.
Speaker 1: Oh you mean like, um, like you just stream? Yes,
Speaker 1: you're you're up the creek. I thought you meant, now,
Speaker 1: you don't have to have cable to get PBS. You
Speaker 1: just like help people in the world and just beams
Speaker 1: under your eyelids. You know what I was thinking? You
Speaker 1: have to stand there and hold like a coat hanger
Speaker 1: a certain way in your TV. In the other hand,
Speaker 1: you can get PBS. I'm gonna buy it though it
Speaker 1: looks great, why not? It is good, and I would
Speaker 1: say I would, I would say it's worth roughly sixty
Speaker 1: it's pretty good. But anyway, Chris christoffers and figures big
Speaker 1: into one of the episode like it's not worth more
Speaker 1: than forty five, go ahead and pay right because it
Speaker 1: goes to Kim Burns hairdresser. That's right, and that's a
Speaker 1: quite a collection of brushes that person has to maintain.
Speaker 1: But Chris Christofferson has interviewed like today and thing he
Speaker 1: looks exactly like let's see now. Well, I try to
Speaker 1: get him on movie Crush because he played the City Winery,
Speaker 1: which is like attached to our building basically, So I
Speaker 1: will try and get people from over there on the
Speaker 1: basis of like are you gonna do? Was walk over there?
Speaker 1: Called the parking lot right his His manager emailed me
Speaker 1: back and said, and this should hearten you as well,
Speaker 1: said I'm actually it's stuff you should know. Fan the
Speaker 1: manager and said, but you know what, um, he doesn't
Speaker 1: really do interviews anymore. So maybe I just got the
Speaker 1: the easy, the easy paths, but man, I really wanted
Speaker 1: that one to come through to dude in this office.
Speaker 1: That would have been pretty special. But I'm no Kin Burns.
Speaker 1: No who is kin Burns? Yeah that's true. All right,
Speaker 1: let's talk. Should we take a break, Let's go back,
Speaker 1: chuck a little bit, let's get in the way back machine.
Speaker 1: It's been a little while. Okay, we're gonna go back,
Speaker 1: and we even know exactly when we're going back to
Speaker 1: one pm on September. Whoa one. I'm I'm in college.
Speaker 1: It's a salad days. I'm wearing a Flavor Flavor clock
Speaker 1: around my neck. I was a sophomore in high school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's all I have to say about that. I never
Speaker 1: wore the Flavor Flavor clock. But trying to let that
Speaker 1: be well, I should have. I was not cool enough,
Speaker 1: but I was listening to Apocalypse. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't have admitted that you didn't work, But no
Speaker 1: one believe that. You know, I'm not that cool. You know.
Speaker 1: Aaron Cooper made a pretty awesome one of my favorite
Speaker 1: ones of all time. It was us as Public Enemy,
Speaker 1: and I think I'm flavor flavor in it. But you
Speaker 1: look like Chuck D. And it's cool. It's a cool
Speaker 1: photo shop of us. I tried to get Chuck D
Speaker 1: on Movie Crushed too. Did he play the city Winery? No,
Speaker 1: but he lives in Atlanta. I didn't know that and
Speaker 1: at least part time, Boy did he say he did
Speaker 1: say anything because the management company at email said we
Speaker 1: don't manage him anymore. So it was just a dead end.
Speaker 1: I got you the Chuck the If you're listening Pont
Speaker 1: City Market, let's come, let's talk about your favorite movie.
Speaker 1: Right and also shout out to Chris Christofferson's manager. That's right,
Speaker 1: of course. Alright, boy, we're gonna have to go back
Speaker 1: and ed it all this happened. No, it's one thirty
Speaker 1: pm e septemb and we are hiking with Erica and
Speaker 1: Helmut Simon there German. But we are hiking in the
Speaker 1: oats all Alps in Italy. Yes, between Italy and Austria,
Speaker 1: like right on the border, very close to the border.
Speaker 1: Um and on this peak the uh. The Simons decided
Speaker 1: that as they were descending that they would take a
Speaker 1: short cut, and the shortcut took him through this past
Speaker 1: pastor crevasse and in this little shallow crevasse, they said, oh,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a dead body. There's a corpse. And
Speaker 1: you were like what I was because we were there too,
Speaker 1: right yeah, And I said it's right time, boy, right exactly. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. So the thing is is they could they
Speaker 1: could see it was I could ever like they could
Speaker 1: see the corpses, back, back of the head, arm hanging out, um.
Speaker 1: And they just thought, well, we heard that there was
Speaker 1: a hiker that was recently killed, and that's probably who
Speaker 1: that is. We'll take a couple of pictures and go
Speaker 1: down and tell somebody who owns like the nearest lodge.
Speaker 1: And on the way down, you and I are going like,
Speaker 1: that was not a hiker that was recently killed. Even
Speaker 1: I knew that, Like, did you see that guy? He
Speaker 1: was super old. He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy,
Speaker 1: and the Simon's were not crazy, but I'm sure they
Speaker 1: were saying the same thing. They were just out of
Speaker 1: your shot, right. So they they some people went up
Speaker 1: and I think within a day or two they went
Speaker 1: up to try to get this dead hiker who they
Speaker 1: thought was a dead hiker out and they did a
Speaker 1: terrible job with it. They used ski poles to chip
Speaker 1: away at the ice. They used an ice hammer to
Speaker 1: chip away at the ice. Um damaged the body. But
Speaker 1: they think, well, it's just like some hiker or whatever.
Speaker 1: It will be fine. Put him in a wooden cast
Speaker 1: it um. And this article makes it sound like he
Speaker 1: like the whole world or everybody who knew about this body.
Speaker 1: I just thought it was a modern hiker for you know,
Speaker 1: a while, until the body came down the mountains. That's
Speaker 1: not the case. One of the things that when they
Speaker 1: were getting this body out the accidentally excavated was a
Speaker 1: copper headed axe, and word got out that there was
Speaker 1: an axe with this body, and that is really weird
Speaker 1: copper with like a wooden shaft and everything was clearly
Speaker 1: a very very very old um axe. And so pretty
Speaker 1: quickly they realized that they were onto something here for sure.
Speaker 1: And what they found out was this body hi frozen body.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever five thousand years old.
Speaker 1: That's the same like, same little bit as he goes
Speaker 1: moon pie a not a Abes buddy. What's his name?
Speaker 1: Oh man, it will become me later, I'll say it.
Speaker 1: People are screaming. I can picture him now, Oh what
Speaker 1: is it? I want to say, like Chauncey or Chalmers?
Speaker 1: Is not that very similar to that? Honestly? All right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep going. So they get this body out
Speaker 1: and UM removed it on September, sealed it up, like
Speaker 1: you said, flew it out of town in a wooden
Speaker 1: coffin to Ennsbruck, the Institute of Forensic Medicine. And there
Speaker 1: was an archaeologist named Conrad Spindler there who said, uh,
Speaker 1: this body is at least four thousand years old, at
Speaker 1: the very least. What's abes friends name, Jasper Beard? Of course,
Speaker 1: so they nicknamed the Utsi because of the region of
Speaker 1: the all Alps. Very cute little name it is. Other
Speaker 1: people call him frozen Fritz. Really yeah, I like, let's
Speaker 1: see way more so. Um. In pretty short order they
Speaker 1: realized that what they had just excavated in the roughest
Speaker 1: possible manner and accidentally come upon was the corpse of
Speaker 1: a fifty three hundred year old body. Yes, And when
Speaker 1: I said the guy said it was four thousand years old?
Speaker 1: He he said that was the initial Like he's at
Speaker 1: least this old, right, But it turns out that after
Speaker 1: further study, they figured out he was actually fifty years
Speaker 1: old and that he lived in the Copper Age, which
Speaker 1: was a relatively brief period in human history, but a
Speaker 1: really important one um between the Neolithic Age at the
Speaker 1: end of the Neolithic Age when the first farmers started
Speaker 1: to appear, and the Bronze Age, when the first what
Speaker 1: we consider society and civilization in history began. And we
Speaker 1: know very little about this, and what hikers had discovered
Speaker 1: was a snapshot of life during that time because let's see,
Speaker 1: appeared to have just died where he fell where he died,
Speaker 1: or died where he fell. Yeah, it was almost there
Speaker 1: um and leaving his his belongings with him, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't he wasn't like a great revered figure. He wasn't buried,
Speaker 1: he wasn't prepared. He was kept intact for fifty years
Speaker 1: on this glacier. Yeah, that was the biggest deal because
Speaker 1: they have mummies, and they have older mummies, but like
Speaker 1: you said, it's their organs are removed. They're filled with
Speaker 1: you know, embalming chemicals and things they used at the
Speaker 1: time for preservation for the afterlife and all this. So
Speaker 1: this was a really big deal. To find this body
Speaker 1: just really really scarily well preserved. And when we say
Speaker 1: well preserved, it doesn't look like Chris Christofferson but not anymore.
Speaker 1: The organs were there and like didn't the red blood
Speaker 1: cells have still intact. Yeah, it's the oldest intact blood
Speaker 1: sample ever taken. Um Let's sees was so and the
Speaker 1: fact that he wasn't buried provides a snapshot. It wasn't ritualized.
Speaker 1: It was this guy was just living his life and
Speaker 1: he died and happened to be preserved perfectly. So his
Speaker 1: belongings were preserved along with them and things that are
Speaker 1: organic and typically typically um decay long before years comes
Speaker 1: and goes. So his clothing made of like different types
Speaker 1: of leather was preserved. His his coat or cape made
Speaker 1: of woven grasses was preserved. It was a really cool
Speaker 1: when you look at the shoes and the bear skin
Speaker 1: had and bear skin hat was another one. His tool
Speaker 1: kit was preserved. All of the stuff that we had
Speaker 1: like like just kind of little hints and traces and
Speaker 1: glimpses of from different like burial cashes or just happened
Speaker 1: to find some artifact or whatever. This was like a
Speaker 1: straight up polaroid picture of life in the Coppers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum of
Speaker 1: Natural History display, but it was real, right, you know,
Speaker 1: well put chuck. You know who would have loved that analogy?
Speaker 1: Chris Christophers. It's not gonna say either Jasper or Arty.
Speaker 1: And I don't mean would have in the fact that
Speaker 1: he's dead, I mean would have had he heard it.
Speaker 1: I agree, he's never going to hear this. You never know.
Speaker 1: I'm like using reverse. They called his manager right now,
Speaker 1: Well do you might as well. Willie Nelson will never
Speaker 1: listen to these either, neither World Dolly Parton. We want
Speaker 1: all the country legends listening. Ronnie millsap will never hear this.
Speaker 1: Was okay, not with us though, because he doesn't listen
Speaker 1: to stuff you should know and never will. So apparently
Speaker 1: where where Artsy actually fell was pretty lucky because it
Speaker 1: was in a very shallow crevasse and the fact that
Speaker 1: that was uh kind of walled up on both sides
Speaker 1: of him kept him. If he was just out in
Speaker 1: the open, the freeze thought cycle over the years would
Speaker 1: have washed everything away and ripped him apart. And uh,
Speaker 1: it didn't happen because he kind of fell in this
Speaker 1: crevasse um, all five ft two hundred and thirty four
Speaker 1: pounds of him, which is a hundred and fifty eight
Speaker 1: centimeters And that's right. He had brown eyes. Apparently at
Speaker 1: five two was even a little short for the time,
Speaker 1: but he was ripped. Yeah, he was pretty sturdy, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in his mid forties, like we said, and
Speaker 1: really strong legs. And you know, kind of the fun
Speaker 1: thing about this is the archaeological forensics of trying to
Speaker 1: piece together like what was he doing, how did he die? What?
Speaker 1: We'll get to all that, but just the fact that,
Speaker 1: like he had big legs. They were like this guy,
Speaker 1: he's probably go hurder. He's walking up and down these
Speaker 1: mountains all the time. Look at those calves. He looked
Speaker 1: like that guy from that one Liberty Mutual commercial. I
Speaker 1: don't know, what do you mean, It doesn't matter, like
Speaker 1: ten people this laft. What else did he had? He
Speaker 1: had a dagger, he had that axe you're talking about.
Speaker 1: The dagger, had a wicker sheath, he had um a backpack.
Speaker 1: He had a leather pouch. Yeah. The backpack, by the way,
Speaker 1: we'll never know how it worked because it got destroyed
Speaker 1: by the people who went and dug him out of
Speaker 1: the ice. He had some rudimentary snowshoes. He had a belt.
Speaker 1: He had had a belt that matched his cape, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: oh man, and we'll talk about that. But apparently they
Speaker 1: think that was on purpose. Yes, that he was a
Speaker 1: bit of a fashionista. Um. He had a couple of
Speaker 1: like vessels that were lined with um maple leaves that
Speaker 1: he used to carry embers from place to place so
Speaker 1: he wouldn't have to start a fire again. And all
Speaker 1: the stuff. You're like, I'm cool a flint dagger, cool
Speaker 1: copper x oh some members, Yeah, I do too. But
Speaker 1: I can see people out there being like, uh, talk
Speaker 1: about math or something. Right. The thing is is like
Speaker 1: all this stuff that seems kind of boring and superficial
Speaker 1: has been so thoroughly study that it's actually been used
Speaker 1: to paint a larger picture. Like we understand the copper
Speaker 1: age in Europe way better than we did before he
Speaker 1: was discovered just from finding this, the few things that
Speaker 1: he died with and him himself. He also interestingly had
Speaker 1: sixty one tattoos all over his body. I've been waiting
Speaker 1: for this day. What you said tattoos correctly? Oh, you
Speaker 1: mean the tattoos, so uh yeah, and they were they
Speaker 1: covered him from head to toe in different parts, and
Speaker 1: they didn't use needles back then obviously, but they would
Speaker 1: rub or cut the skin open and then rub charcoal inside,
Speaker 1: and they're all They mapped him out in two thousand
Speaker 1: fifteen and organized them into nineteen groups, and they are basically,
Speaker 1: you know, like maybe three identical lines, short lines like
Speaker 1: an inch long, or like a cross, not a spiritual
Speaker 1: religious cross, but you know, like a plus sign, yeah,
Speaker 1: or like a Chinese character that has some inspirational association
Speaker 1: perseverance or something had a lower back tattoo of a
Speaker 1: thorny branch um. But yeah, they map these all out,
Speaker 1: and for a while they thought, and some people still think,
Speaker 1: because they were largely found around the joints and along
Speaker 1: his back um, and he had back problems, and they
Speaker 1: he basically was marked up where he hurt, it looks like,
Speaker 1: and they thought it might have been either acuput puncture
Speaker 1: points to mark or it might have been the acupuncture
Speaker 1: treatment itself, right, but it does. They do think that
Speaker 1: it had something to do with acupuncture, which in and
Speaker 1: of itself was a big revelation because they thought up
Speaker 1: to that point that acupuncture had been invented two thousand
Speaker 1: years after, let see, and way further eastern in Asia, right,
Speaker 1: But now they think that may not have been the
Speaker 1: case because they found um a new cluster of tattoos
Speaker 1: on his chest that they didn't formally recognize, and they
Speaker 1: were like, there are no acupuncture points there, and he
Speaker 1: didn't have any injuries there. So now they're they didn't
Speaker 1: throw it out with the bathwater. But there are people
Speaker 1: now they're saying like, we don't know if that's true
Speaker 1: or not. No, Okay, so I'm really glad you said that.
Speaker 1: Everything that we know about Letsie, aside from the fact
Speaker 1: that he is dead, that we have a pretty good
Speaker 1: idea of when he lived, probably was height, weight, was
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Everything else is interpretation. So you have
Speaker 1: to remember that interpretation super educated and usually UM displaying
Speaker 1: the current understanding of history or interpretation of history or events,
Speaker 1: but um, it is still interpretation. That's part of archaeology
Speaker 1: and anthropology and history, especially when you're talking about prehistory.
Speaker 1: This is he lived during a time before anybody wrote
Speaker 1: anything down or recorded anything, which makes it prehistoric. But
Speaker 1: you just bear that in mind that everything we're talking about,
Speaker 1: and every a thing you go read about OTSI is
Speaker 1: very much described in absolute terms, but it is our
Speaker 1: picture and image of him. How he lived, how he
Speaker 1: died has really shaped and shifted over the years since
Speaker 1: he was discovered, and it still is. It's still malleable.
Speaker 1: Nothing is definitive. Nothing said in ice. All right, let's
Speaker 1: take a break. It was a bad joke. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about Urtsey's health, right for this. Was he healthy? I
Speaker 1: mean he was. No. He was a person of age
Speaker 1: in his mid forties of a time where at that
Speaker 1: age he's going to be pretty beat up. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: wasn't unhealthy and like the modern sense where he's like
Speaker 1: deliberately wrecking his health because he's eating too much junk
Speaker 1: food or something like you know me. Yeah, but he
Speaker 1: was unhealthy in the way that a person would be
Speaker 1: unhealthy from living close to the land at a time
Speaker 1: before medicine had really developed. Yeah, exactly, no doctors, no dentists.
Speaker 1: So as you would imagine, he had gum disease, heart disease,
Speaker 1: lime disease, gallbladder stones, hardened arteries, gall stones. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: disorders so nice, we named it twice, right, He had
Speaker 1: a whipworm parasite in his gut. He had h pylori
Speaker 1: in his gut um. And all of this is to say,
Speaker 1: like you said, he was probably a pretty normal dude
Speaker 1: of mid forties of the time. Uh, he was. They
Speaker 1: couldn't find his stomach for a long time. It's amazing
Speaker 1: how much of the stuff like it was found over
Speaker 1: the years, Like this tattoo. This new tattoo was just
Speaker 1: found a few years ago after like many many years
Speaker 1: of study. His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded
Speaker 1: people for decades, but they couldn't even find his stomach
Speaker 1: and they found it, like, oh, here it is twenty
Speaker 1: years later. They found it wedged up between his ribs
Speaker 1: and his lungs. Yeah. Then they found it because they
Speaker 1: noticed tia gall stones. So they basically traced a path
Speaker 1: from the gall bladder to the stomach and said, there
Speaker 1: it is. We found it. And they were really happy
Speaker 1: they found it because when they started dissected or take
Speaker 1: samples from it, they found that it was full. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He died like within an hour or so of eating
Speaker 1: his last meal and hadn't digested it. He had food
Speaker 1: in his in his colon. Uh, he had food and
Speaker 1: his intestines. He had a turtle head peeking out. That's awesome.
Speaker 1: What his last meal was dried ibex and deer meat
Speaker 1: with ink horn wheat, Yes, and slow plums. I don't
Speaker 1: know why that wasn't mentioned. Can get that same meal
Speaker 1: in served you by a guy with a waxed mustache
Speaker 1: and like some sort of arm band, an armed guard. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: an armed guarter. That's that's it, isn't it. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1: Um So he they think some sort of like fatty
Speaker 1: cured meat, kind of like a bacon cured bacon today.
Speaker 1: And the iron iron i corn wheat was from bread.
Speaker 1: And he also ate slow plums. Got okay, slow plums Yeah,
Speaker 1: that they make slow gin from. Oh really, which I've
Speaker 1: never had, have you? That's s l o e right
Speaker 1: yeah right. It's like it's supposedly a very tart, kind
Speaker 1: of bitterish plum, but it was it's like load of vitamins.
Speaker 1: I've never had it. I remember it seemed like an
Speaker 1: old person drink was a slow gin fizz, like an
Speaker 1: old person who's like a hundred fifty year olds old. Yes.
Speaker 1: When when I lived in Arizona, there were all the
Speaker 1: snowbirds are down there. They drink like slow gin fizz. Really,
Speaker 1: I've never been present when somebody ordered a slow gim fizz. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would like to try one. Sure, try one. Okay, Josh,
Speaker 1: get a couple of slogan fizzics. Make it a double.
Speaker 1: I guarantee. There's a bar in this dumb building that
Speaker 1: has lgent businessman. Sure, you know, with armed guards. Um,
Speaker 1: can I keep? The armed guard comes with the drink.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit more about the copper Age.
Speaker 1: I guess um he had, well, what we'll save his
Speaker 1: injuries for a minute. Here, we'll talk a bit a
Speaker 1: little about his lifestyle in the copper Age. Like you said,
Speaker 1: he was, as demonstrated by his meals, he lived a
Speaker 1: pretty like farming pleasant life down there, it seems like,
Speaker 1: but not one without conflict, you know. Sure based on
Speaker 1: his meals, well, based on his meals, he lived a
Speaker 1: farming type lifestyle. But based on injuries we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about it seems like that, you know, he he
Speaker 1: had some enemies. So from from what I saw, and
Speaker 1: I mean we used a lot of different articles, but
Speaker 1: National Geographic is very well represented. And here live science
Speaker 1: history dot Com the BBC. I came across something from
Speaker 1: the Pen Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum or U Penn Museum.
Speaker 1: I think they have a magazine called Expedition that was
Speaker 1: pretty awesome. It had a pretty great thing, And I
Speaker 1: saw a couple of things from um historians that wrote
Speaker 1: up basically descriptions of let's see and thought co which
Speaker 1: is this is a surprising great resource. Yeah have you
Speaker 1: ever noticed Yes, yeah, so um in In one of these,
Speaker 1: I saw that it was kind of put like he
Speaker 1: he lived as a farmer and enjoyed like the fruits
Speaker 1: of village life too, so things like cheese and processed
Speaker 1: grains and cereals, so bread and stuff like that, and
Speaker 1: the um the idea is that he didn't know how
Speaker 1: to bake bread or make cheese. He he was part
Speaker 1: of a villager or society where somebody knew how to
Speaker 1: bake bread and somebody knew how to make changes, so
Speaker 1: the professions were starting to emerge. But that he also
Speaker 1: was pastoral and that like he he herded sheep and
Speaker 1: that's probably what he did most of it most of
Speaker 1: the time. And then he also lived very close to
Speaker 1: the earth the land as well, like his last meal
Speaker 1: was wild game ibex and deer and slow plums that
Speaker 1: he probably plucked himself. So he was kind of like
Speaker 1: this transitional human from from the hunter gatherer passed into
Speaker 1: the agrarian, agriculture based future that spread out just ahead
Speaker 1: of him. Yeah, Like just ahead of him were like
Speaker 1: real deal Italians out there, bacon baguetts, well that's French, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what I mean Italian bread? Yeah, yeah, in Italy they
Speaker 1: just call it bread, that's right. Uh. They I mentioned
Speaker 1: earlier that his clothes matched and they do think, and
Speaker 1: of course again this is all speculation, but these garments
Speaker 1: were pretty refined, even when you look at him now,
Speaker 1: like he had these fur skin leggings that were held
Speaker 1: up by spenders by Alexander McQueen. Oh man, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: saw that. I know. That was amazing. So good. Um,
Speaker 1: and a great documentary on him too, that's good and sad. Uh.
Speaker 1: The they talk about the color of the animal skin, Zoe,
Speaker 1: the contrasting colors, they think, we're actually matched, like elaborately,
Speaker 1: and he had, like, like you said, a sense of style,
Speaker 1: like you know, is that possible? Yeah, But I mean
Speaker 1: it seems like a lot to extrapolate that his coat
Speaker 1: and his belt matched, and so they were like, hey,
Speaker 1: he had a real personal identity, whereas in it could
Speaker 1: have been just like that's the materials that he had
Speaker 1: on hand that fit. That's possible. But I think what
Speaker 1: they're what they would assert is that um, it has
Speaker 1: enough panache that the chances of it just being random
Speaker 1: are very unlikely or less likely than it being you know,
Speaker 1: asserting his sense of fashion and well and he was Italian,
Speaker 1: that's right, So you know, Italians and their fashion go
Speaker 1: hand in hand. Everyone who's been to Millino knows that.
Speaker 1: Or Fenze. Remember when I was touring Europe as a youth,
Speaker 1: my friend and I laughing at the Italian guys and
Speaker 1: the hostels were like the nineteen year old dudes were
Speaker 1: so put together and like would spend so much time
Speaker 1: in the mirror wearing the cologne and getting their hair
Speaker 1: just perfect, and we were just disgusting humans. And they
Speaker 1: got the girls. So it turns out that they were
Speaker 1: onto something a little bit of extraffer really does and
Speaker 1: the big hair. Yeah, they were great guys. So we
Speaker 1: met some cool Italian dudes. One of the other things too, though,
Speaker 1: that the fact that he clearly was involved in a village.
Speaker 1: They think that he was associated with a particular village
Speaker 1: to the south, in a valley near you know, the mountains. Um.
Speaker 1: It was things like bread and cheese that they think
Speaker 1: they found in his body. Um, but also the fact
Speaker 1: that he did not he obviously didn't know how to
Speaker 1: make his own tools. Somebody else had. Um. He probably
Speaker 1: did not know how to weave the cape he was wearing.
Speaker 1: Somebody else had done that. Yeah, they're all they all
Speaker 1: had their specialties that. Yeah, the tattoos, he couldn't have
Speaker 1: put some of them on his own body. He probably
Speaker 1: went to see a medical practition or to do that. So, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is at a point when specialists and and specialized
Speaker 1: professions are starting to emerge. It's a really cool time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is these are the things that we've learned from,
Speaker 1: you know, that we've gleaned from the stuff that we
Speaker 1: found with him. I think it's just astoundingly fascinating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really cool. This is a really interesting period I
Speaker 1: think of human development. It's also called, by the way, um,
Speaker 1: the copper age or the chocolthic like copper age to
Speaker 1: chalcolithic just kind of coughs out of the mouth in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so let's talk a little bit about what might have
Speaker 1: happened to see and how he found himself dead on
Speaker 1: that mountain, because there quite a theories over the years,
Speaker 1: and like you said, even this week they have some
Speaker 1: more leads. But he was wounded. He had a really
Speaker 1: bad wound on his right hand. They found out he
Speaker 1: was right handed too, so this is a big deal
Speaker 1: between his thumb and his forefinger there. That area went
Speaker 1: all the way down to the bone. But it looked
Speaker 1: like it had healed up a little bit. Um, So
Speaker 1: it probably happened they said, within a few days of
Speaker 1: when he died, but it was healing. But it was
Speaker 1: a big injury, like we said, because he was right handed,
Speaker 1: and um, but it's not the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: that killed him, Like he didn't bleed out from that
Speaker 1: or anything like that. No, So um, it makes you think,
Speaker 1: well I did kill him then, right, Well, they think
Speaker 1: that might have been from a fight. Perhaps that wound
Speaker 1: that has been almost universally agreed upon from the outset
Speaker 1: right that he probably didn't inflict that wound himself. That
Speaker 1: it seems to have been a defensive wound. Right. There's
Speaker 1: a guy named Alexander Horne, who is an inspector with
Speaker 1: the Munich Police, and so we should give just a
Speaker 1: little background for a second. When he was found, he
Speaker 1: was taken into Germany down the mountain into Austria Innsbruck.
Speaker 1: Austria and the Germans were heavily involved as well as
Speaker 1: the Austrians and the Italians were less involved, and that's
Speaker 1: where he kind of stayed for the first few years,
Speaker 1: I think about a decade or less after he was discovered,
Speaker 1: and then eventually it was transferred to Italy. The Italian side, yeah,
Speaker 1: because they were like, he's a founder on our side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like just to barely I think. Also, I don't know
Speaker 1: if this contributed to or if it came later, but
Speaker 1: he does seem to have been linked to the Italian side,
Speaker 1: where like you said, he was an Italian. So he
Speaker 1: was transferred to Italy and when they when they took
Speaker 1: custody of them man, they pulled out all the stops.
Speaker 1: They put him up in Bolzano, Italy, near about I
Speaker 1: think like thirty miles or something from where he was found. Uh.
Speaker 1: They built a museum specifically for him, an institute built
Speaker 1: around studying him, and they proceeded to study him more
Speaker 1: than any other mummy has ever been studied, probably any
Speaker 1: other body than has ever been studying in the history
Speaker 1: of the world. Um and have just turned out paper
Speaker 1: after paper after paper based on their findings from them.
Speaker 1: Um so. But at first, some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: we have about let's seeing what happened to him come
Speaker 1: from the earliest interpretations posed by the Germans and the
Speaker 1: Austrians when they had custody of its right, which weren't
Speaker 1: necessarily right, as it turns out, no, but some may
Speaker 1: have been. But my ultimate point was, everybody says from
Speaker 1: the outset that the wound in his hand was a
Speaker 1: defensive wound that came from close combat with somebody else.
Speaker 1: That's right. For a while they thought there was an
Speaker 1: Austrian archaeologist named Conrad Spindler that I mentioned earlier that
Speaker 1: they sort of recreated the scene. And their contention early
Speaker 1: on was like, man that acts is leaning up against
Speaker 1: the rock, it's propped up there, like we think everything
Speaker 1: is literally frozen in time from how it was is.
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the things that they've
Speaker 1: later refuted, right, And they said that it looks like
Speaker 1: things might have moved around something. Yeah, they think that
Speaker 1: the um what would you call it, the site I
Speaker 1: guess from the freeze thaw cycle just kind of distributed,
Speaker 1: redistributed this stuff. Yeah, which you know, it's still all valid,
Speaker 1: but it not necessarily it was not necessarily exactly as
Speaker 1: it was at his moment of death. Um. They did
Speaker 1: find his hat though, off of his head, as if
Speaker 1: it just like kind of fell off of his head,
Speaker 1: which might have been true. Right, So some of those
Speaker 1: early stuff. They also found what they thought were fractured
Speaker 1: ribs that had not healed. Right, So the earliest picture
Speaker 1: was this like they treated it like this is a
Speaker 1: dead body mystery. Where did this dead body come from?
Speaker 1: How did he die? Yeah? But well quickly though, they
Speaker 1: also found pollen in his gut that they thought came
Speaker 1: from an autumn plant, So they were like, he died
Speaker 1: in the fall, right. Okay, so that's the full setup
Speaker 1: of the bad information. So the first idea, and I
Speaker 1: think it was Spindler who came up with the disaster theory,
Speaker 1: wasn't Conrad. Spindler said, Okay, here's what happened to Let's see,
Speaker 1: he came down from the mountain, probably hurting some sheep
Speaker 1: or goats, went down to his village, uh, and got
Speaker 1: in an altercation with somebody cut his hand. You're looking
Speaker 1: at my wife, right, that kind of thing. That's nice, um,
Speaker 1: and he fled or oh and part part of the
Speaker 1: altercation also resulted in some cracked ribs and either fled
Speaker 1: or left escaped up the mountain again where he became
Speaker 1: exhausted from his cracked ribs and his cut hand, and
Speaker 1: uh he laid down or fell into this little shallow
Speaker 1: crevasse and died of exposure to hypothermia. That was the
Speaker 1: disaster theory. And that was that, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: they had that for a few years, and somebody came
Speaker 1: along and said, I don't think that's right. That's right, um,
Speaker 1: because they found out some of the things, like the
Speaker 1: site had melted some and then things were in different
Speaker 1: positions they originally thought. Probably they examined the ribs again
Speaker 1: and said they were actually not fractured before he died. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that they were just a little bent. Yeah from like
Speaker 1: after his death, probably from the push of ice, the
Speaker 1: pressure from ice fusing on him again exactly. That'll that'll
Speaker 1: crack your ribs in a second or bend your ribs.
Speaker 1: The big one, though, was what they found in the
Speaker 1: X ray in two thousand one, Right, you know what
Speaker 1: they found? Should we take a break, all right, we'll
Speaker 1: discover what they found right after this? What do they find, Chuck?
Speaker 1: They found a freaking arrow head lodged in his shoulder,
Speaker 1: back shoulder. That was a verbatim quote from the press conference.
Speaker 1: This was a big deal. They missed it for ten years,
Speaker 1: they missed the thing, and they found it. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just a regular X ray And they said,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, that looks denser than bone. What is that.
Speaker 1: It's a triangle. It's a triangle. And it was a
Speaker 1: thirteen millimeter gash along a major artery in his chest.
Speaker 1: And they're like, he bled to death up there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they said, there's no way he would have survived. This
Speaker 1: is unhealed. This this is finally what killed him. So
Speaker 1: this disaster theory that he got in an altercation but
Speaker 1: ultimately died of exposure hypothermia UM was replaced by the
Speaker 1: murder theory, which is very similar, but there's some important
Speaker 1: nuances in differences. One, so the cracked rib thing, just
Speaker 1: throw that away. It was a red herring UM. But
Speaker 1: the altercation is still the same. He comes down the mountain,
Speaker 1: he gets in a fight of some sort, go back
Speaker 1: up the mountain with his cut hand, and while he's
Speaker 1: hanging out, maybe tending to his wound, maybe trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do next. That's my arrow impression
Speaker 1: message for you. So yeah, right in the back, in
Speaker 1: the back. From a distance, they think due to the
Speaker 1: penetration from the arrowhead from about thirty that is it
Speaker 1: is a good shot. Because it was a kill shot
Speaker 1: from thirty and fifty ft. That's a that's a ways, um.
Speaker 1: I can't quite put it into an easy analogy, but
Speaker 1: that's a long that's a long way. Um. And the
Speaker 1: fact that it was in the back, he never saw
Speaker 1: it coming and it would have killed him pretty quickly
Speaker 1: was a punk move, is what it was. It was.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. Because his possessions were left intact um
Speaker 1: and because he had that defensive wound, they think that
Speaker 1: this was the result of his death, as murder was
Speaker 1: the result of a personal conflict. There was no theft
Speaker 1: involved or anything like that, because his copper acts alone
Speaker 1: would have been pretty valuable at the time that somebody
Speaker 1: would have taken it had they killed him for something
Speaker 1: like robbery. Yeah, so this was a vendetta, yes, or
Speaker 1: at least a personal fight that happened that day, yeah,
Speaker 1: or maybe a long standing for you. There's no way
Speaker 1: to tell here. Here we reached the point where the
Speaker 1: historians and the archaeologists are like, we really can't say,
Speaker 1: but here's some ideas for me. It's either the person
Speaker 1: who he fought came back for revenge. I think, and
Speaker 1: this is a total guest, but I was trained in history,
Speaker 1: so I'm allowed to do this. He was trained in history, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. I studied history in college. That's what they
Speaker 1: call it. They're like, just how you do it? Train
Speaker 1: history camp? Right? Um? He he was successful in that
Speaker 1: hand to hand combat and killed the other person. Whether
Speaker 1: it was offensive or defensive. I like to think it
Speaker 1: was defensive. He didn't have a choice. Um. But the
Speaker 1: person's family came back and killed him up on the mountain. Gotcha.
Speaker 1: That's the current idea. Well, not that last part that
Speaker 1: it was his family, but what I said leading up
Speaker 1: to that, everything about that, um, everything else about that.
Speaker 1: I'm really sorry, Chris Christopherson. Um, that's the current idea
Speaker 1: of what happened. Let I think so you're not going
Speaker 1: with my jealous lover theory. No, okay, no, I'm not
Speaker 1: all right. I think it was a woman with that arrow.
Speaker 1: You think the woman a woman shot him. Yeah, jealous lover.
Speaker 1: I think he was stepping out and he was like
Speaker 1: holding up his hands like baby, baby, it wouldn't me.
Speaker 1: And she slices him with the her implement of choice
Speaker 1: and then dices him with the arrow. And then he's like,
Speaker 1: this is getting too serious. You're crazy, and so he
Speaker 1: heads up the mountains and she's like, I'll show you crazy.
Speaker 1: She turns into close, she goes and forges an arrow,
Speaker 1: and then in that time it took her to forage
Speaker 1: that arrow from hardened molten you know, l flint hirt shirt.
Speaker 1: He's up that hill a little bit and she's like,
Speaker 1: no problem, watch this right in the back. I like
Speaker 1: that one too. Alright. I'm going with family, family, because
Speaker 1: I mean, you know the rule, can't trust family, trust family.
Speaker 1: So um, speaking of that churt, uh, he did not
Speaker 1: have um, he didn't have blanks. Yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: evidence that he didn't know how to create his own tools.
Speaker 1: Somebody applicate these tools, which apparently were sort of on
Speaker 1: their last legs. Yeah, that was another thing too, So
Speaker 1: he did not have what he needed. Like imagine if
Speaker 1: you had um, if you had like a a tool
Speaker 1: an no, a knife, okay, and it's made of flint,
Speaker 1: and you use it over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: it's gonna get worn down and eventually it's gonna get
Speaker 1: so worn down that you just can't use it anymore.
Speaker 1: This is essentially the state of his arrowheads and his
Speaker 1: knife and some of his others, his stone tools in particular,
Speaker 1: that he was not in a position to defend himself
Speaker 1: with his own tools because he'd used them up. And
Speaker 1: I wonder if the if he's not making these in
Speaker 1: the village, if they're like ertsies, you know he's have
Speaker 1: you guys noticed he's on the way out, Like, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna be making any more tools for Ertsie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can think we don't have many. He'll just make
Speaker 1: do with what he's got, it said, but he owes
Speaker 1: me money, So should we talk about moss. This was
Speaker 1: astounding to me that this happened in the last few days,
Speaker 1: because did you pick this out before this happened or
Speaker 1: was it serendifically? This is what I saw that made
Speaker 1: me say it's time, Okay, I got you. So researchers
Speaker 1: found uh these moth spores uh that were inside of him,
Speaker 1: that he had ingested and just on him and around him. Um,
Speaker 1: seventy percent of the seventy five species of these mosses
Speaker 1: and liverwarts were not local. And they basically said, there's
Speaker 1: no way these would have been on the side of
Speaker 1: the mountain if not for him, right like a bird
Speaker 1: couldn't have transported it this far or something like that, like,
Speaker 1: let's he brought these up here. And so in doing
Speaker 1: that and in tracing like these mosses and spores and everything,
Speaker 1: they have a big clue. They've been able to retrace
Speaker 1: his steps that last basically thirty three hours of his life,
Speaker 1: the last day and a half, and it was not
Speaker 1: a great day and a half for him. He had
Speaker 1: his hand wound. By now by the time we're coming
Speaker 1: in here, he's already got his hand wound. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: got to be smarting. And it's a real problem for
Speaker 1: him too, because even if he could make tools, he
Speaker 1: would have been really troubled to do anything because he
Speaker 1: was right handed, and that's where his wound almost down
Speaker 1: to the bone was was in his right hand, so
Speaker 1: that's a big problem for him right there. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: what they found in is lower colon, which is would
Speaker 1: have been the last I'm sorry, the oldest stuff that
Speaker 1: he had eaten that has not yet been the turtle
Speaker 1: head not yet, not turtle headed yet or I guess
Speaker 1: currently turtle headed. Um, we're pine and spruce pollen, so
Speaker 1: they said, And it's kind of neat. That's what I
Speaker 1: love about this, like historical forensics, like, oh, well, we
Speaker 1: know what was in his body, and we know where
Speaker 1: that stuff is. It's not at certain altitudes. It was
Speaker 1: a high altitude for us around feet and they know
Speaker 1: because of where it was in his body. This is
Speaker 1: thirty three hours before he died. But the middle tractor
Speaker 1: was colon. That's where all the secrets are. In the colon,
Speaker 1: you know, had pollen from hop hornbeam and that's stuff
Speaker 1: from lower altitudes. It's from lower altitude. But also it
Speaker 1: grows only in the spring and summer. It decays very quickly,
Speaker 1: so it's not something that you would preserve and keep
Speaker 1: for the fall or the winter. Throw out the autumn theory.
Speaker 1: So they say he definitely died in the summer, right
Speaker 1: and I guess that means that he probably descended maybe
Speaker 1: all the way to the bottom of the valley within
Speaker 1: twelve hours, maybe nine to twelve hours of his death,
Speaker 1: and then all the way back up again right where
Speaker 1: he was found dead. And they figured all this out.
Speaker 1: They retraced all this just from those spores and mosses.
Speaker 1: They think, maybe so he he's down in the valley
Speaker 1: to begin with, or in the village, gets that hand wound,
Speaker 1: flees up to the tree line. Um, and then they think,
Speaker 1: because he's like the little lady always needs a few
Speaker 1: days to cool off, right, Oh, you're gonna get some
Speaker 1: email for that one. Um. I retract my right by
Speaker 1: the way. Uh so, and then he goes back down,
Speaker 1: they think to get some mosses because they have anni
Speaker 1: bacterial properties. Yeah, you can also raped meat in it
Speaker 1: apparently too, I guess keep it or whatever. But also
Speaker 1: they may he may have wrapped his hand in it
Speaker 1: or something as well, or maybe maybe then he goes
Speaker 1: back up to the tree too, above the tree line
Speaker 1: where he dies at about ten feet along the way.
Speaker 1: He had that last meal of I box and deer
Speaker 1: and bread and slow plums. Pretty good meal, not bad.
Speaker 1: I wonder if he was panicked, if he knew like,
Speaker 1: I'm in a bad way because of this cut on
Speaker 1: my hand, and my tools and arrowheads are not in
Speaker 1: good shape. I don't know, because it's interesting you only
Speaker 1: know that stuff from seeing it at that point in history,
Speaker 1: Like it would have been like, boy, I've seen that
Speaker 1: kind of wounded before on too, and he did not
Speaker 1: last long. But if you thought somebody was coming after you,
Speaker 1: and you knew that your arrowhead was useless and your
Speaker 1: knife was like dull and you're your stab in hand
Speaker 1: was cut to the bone, you probably wouldn't have had
Speaker 1: to have seen that before to be like, uh, probably
Speaker 1: so well, he was in full retreat from what it
Speaker 1: looks like, right, Yeah, and that's why he was going
Speaker 1: up that mountain. That's that's that's what most people guess. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he was probably scared, yeah, which is sad, But
Speaker 1: that's how we spent this last day and a half
Speaker 1: kind of on the run up and down the mountain,
Speaker 1: which is pretty impressive that he was able to make.
Speaker 1: You know, he went up and down the mountain. Don't
Speaker 1: forget he was wearing moccas and stuff with grass and
Speaker 1: he was old for the time and he had gingervitis. Uh.
Speaker 1: Kind of a neat thing is they have found, um,
Speaker 1: they found some weird markers on his male sex chromosomes
Speaker 1: and they've actually traced some genetic relatives at least nineteen
Speaker 1: people living today, Yeah in Austria, not married but related
Speaker 1: to Yeah. Pretty neat. Yeah, I think so too. So check.
Speaker 1: There's another theory that says, hey, you know, your whole
Speaker 1: murder theory it's bs. Maybe the murder part is correct,
Speaker 1: but he was murdered ritually. This is an a vendetta
Speaker 1: or anything like that. Let's see was buried, right, they
Speaker 1: think that this was a ritual burial on top of
Speaker 1: a mountain. Um, but he you know, it's not the
Speaker 1: kind of Maybe they just want a group that removed
Speaker 1: the organs and did that stuff, right. Yeah, So the
Speaker 1: premise of the burial theory, called the social theory, is
Speaker 1: that he's not a snapshot of everyday life. That they
Speaker 1: didn't that he would have been so heavily laden with
Speaker 1: all of this stuff because we didn't even say he
Speaker 1: he had a bow and arrow, over knife, a hatchet. Um,
Speaker 1: he was wearing moccasins with grass and they're kind of
Speaker 1: like seriously, that's the best they could do at this
Speaker 1: time for the hiking a mountain. That's the shoes you wore, Like,
Speaker 1: those aren't mountain hiking shoes at any point in history. Um.
Speaker 1: And the fact that um, the shaft of the arrow
Speaker 1: was removed, I think they point to is an example
Speaker 1: of the idea that he was um buried, that he
Speaker 1: was killed ritually and buried in this So they think
Speaker 1: the killing was a ritual killing too, because sacrificial killing. Yeah, oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't get that part. And the other thing is
Speaker 1: they're saying, like this stuff, these fancy Alexander McQueen leggings
Speaker 1: that he wore that were basically the predecessor of later hosen,
Speaker 1: there's some pretty nice stuff for a simple like sheep
Speaker 1: herd her is it to be wearing? That's what this
Speaker 1: is what the social theory people are saying. They're they're like,
Speaker 1: we think this guy was actually kind of important and
Speaker 1: that he was buried here um as a sign a symbol.
Speaker 1: And what they found or what they point to, is
Speaker 1: that there's stella like monoliths that were carved in the
Speaker 1: late coper Age a thousand or two thousand years after
Speaker 1: Utsie because he was born at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: coper age that our depictions of somebody dressed a lot
Speaker 1: like Utsie and they think that these are like heroes
Speaker 1: and legends, ancestors, and they're saying, this guy's wearing what
Speaker 1: these people were carving images of a thousand years later,
Speaker 1: maybe he was kind of important, and maybe this has
Speaker 1: also had some ornamentation too, didn't he Yeah, like a
Speaker 1: marble bead, which you know could mean something or could not.
Speaker 1: But the fact that he had so much stuff with
Speaker 1: him does kind of support the idea that maybe it
Speaker 1: was a burial and then to send him into the
Speaker 1: afterlife with all the things he would need exactly. And
Speaker 1: then the other one is no one's ever explained how
Speaker 1: he was so well preserved. That apparently being frozen by
Speaker 1: ice doesn't doesn't cut it. Yeah, that that other people
Speaker 1: have been found who died far later and we're in
Speaker 1: way worse states of decay than as he was, but
Speaker 1: they found no like chemical preservation evidence or anything. No,
Speaker 1: And admittedly at both sides, if if either one of
Speaker 1: them are being honest, they will say we don't know
Speaker 1: how he was this well preserved. Quite a mystery still
Speaker 1: to this day. As much as we know about him,
Speaker 1: he is still a mystery. He's our love and mystery man.
Speaker 1: That's right. If you want to know more about let's see.
Speaker 1: Go type O t Z I and your favorite search
Speaker 1: bar and it will bring up some fascinating stuff. And
Speaker 1: since I said that son for listener man, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: call this the Accidental iron Man. Hey, guys, a big
Speaker 1: fan for a long time. I accidentally did my first
Speaker 1: iron Man in July. And you might think, how in
Speaker 1: the world would that happen? I was thinking exactly. Then
Speaker 1: here's how that happens. I've been doing triathlons since two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen always planned on doing an iron Man at
Speaker 1: one point or at some point, my plan was to
Speaker 1: do a half iron manen do the full thing. In
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, I wanted to do the Iron Man like Placids,
Speaker 1: since it's reasonably close and as a lake swim as
Speaker 1: opposed to a river or in ocean swim. Um. That's
Speaker 1: a hard race to get into, though, because it sells
Speaker 1: out so fast. I got an email tell me registration
Speaker 1: was open, and in my excitement I misread it and
Speaker 1: thought it was for the half, so I signed up
Speaker 1: and realized after the fact that it was the entire
Speaker 1: hundred and forty point six race and not the seventy
Speaker 1: point three Triathlons don't do refunds, so I paid my
Speaker 1: eight hundred dollar plus entry fee and couldn't get it back.
Speaker 1: I could have deferred for a year, but it's decided
Speaker 1: just to go for it. And I finished the race
Speaker 1: in fifteen hours, two minutes and forty three seconds. And
Speaker 1: that is from John Patanyac and an email John back,
Speaker 1: and it's like, you want to give me a couple
Speaker 1: of little tidbits here for listener mail, and he said sure,
Speaker 1: and he wrote back and he said, one thing I
Speaker 1: can say is it really takes over your personal life.
Speaker 1: At my peak, I was training twenty hours a week.
Speaker 1: And he said that is literally just pool, bike or running.
Speaker 1: He said, doesn't count travel to and from the gym,
Speaker 1: cooking meals, prepping equipment. He said, it's literally like a
Speaker 1: part time job. And he said the race was a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. He said, the Lake Placid course goes
Speaker 1: through the old Olympic structures from the nineteen Olympics, and uh,
Speaker 1: you finish at the finish line and the speed skating
Speaker 1: oval that's Nate. Yeah, it's pretty cool a sineficture. It's
Speaker 1: like urban exploration iron right, uh, And he said. One
Speaker 1: of the cool things they do if you're first timer,
Speaker 1: as you wear an orange wristband, so all the volunteers
Speaker 1: and crowd will give you extra support and it says
Speaker 1: I will become one on it. And he said, it
Speaker 1: really works. And he said, and finally at the end,
Speaker 1: the race is so meaningful to so many people. Everyone
Speaker 1: has their own story, but almost nothing is better at
Speaker 1: for a year of training then hearing you are iron Man.
Speaker 1: When he crossed the finish line, it's awesome. They have
Speaker 1: Auzzie singing it. I would, I would? Who else? I
Speaker 1: don't know. I guess Deo could. Again. That is John
Speaker 1: Patoniac Dio is dead, oh is he? Yeah? Ronnie James
Speaker 1: Dio has passed on since when within the last couple
Speaker 1: of years. Yeah. One of the coolest tattoos have ever seen.
Speaker 1: Somebody got like on their arm, their forearms. I've seen that,
Speaker 1: so that when they make like the devil horns or whatever,
Speaker 1: it's Ronnie Dio making the devil horns and the person's
Speaker 1: fingers his arm becomes Yeah, it's really neat it. I
Speaker 1: saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest tattoo
Speaker 1: ever seen. I think it might be. It's pretty Hats
Speaker 1: off to Chris Christofferson's manager, who actually is the person
Speaker 1: with that? That's right? Uh. If you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us, like who is that John Patoniac?
Speaker 1: Thanks John? If you want to get touch of this,
Speaker 1: like John, congratulations too. You can go onto Stuff you
Speaker 1: Should Know and check out our social links. You can
Speaker 1: also send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart
Speaker 1: radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
Speaker 1: of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
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