Selects: The Murder Mystery of Ötzi the Iceman
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Hey everyone, it's Josh, your old pal, and for this week's Select I've chosen our episode on Utsi the Iceman from November of 2019. Utsi was discovered high in the Alps by hikers in 1991, and since then he has become perhaps the world's most closely studied corpse.

He's not only fascinating because of the information he's brought us about everyday life in the Copper Age, where he hails from, he's also fascinating because of what he demonstrates researchers are able to do in the present today. They've gone so far as to recreate his last couple days on Earth. That's how Mac researchers are today. Hope you enjoy this episode because it's a great one. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. ♪

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. And there's guest producer Josh over there, which makes this stuff you should know. All inclusive. And guest ghost host Chuck.

Are you a ghost now? Did you die? No, I just thought if there was two Joshes in here, I'd feel a little left out. Oh, I see. Ganged up on? Yeah, I just, I had no clever way to say it. Ghost toast? You're right about that. My mouth isn't working today. My brain. That's alright. It's been a long week already and it's only Tuesday. Really, right? Yeah. Is it just me? No. It's been a long week. I mean, today's like, I don't know. I don't want to complain. Never mind. Everything's great.

Hey, let me ask you something. Does Oatsy have an umlaut or not? Yes, it's Ootsy. Okay. It rhymes with Tootsie. I saw someone put it. I think our good friends at Smithsonian Magazine. Yeah, Ootsy. There's a bit of an R in there. Yeah. I like Ootsy. All right. Like Tootsie. Roll. Tootsie. The dead mummy. Ootsie. This is a good one. This is exciting.

I've been wanting to do one on this one too. I had too, but in what spurned, spurned or spurred? Spurn is where you say get away. Spur is like go ahead. Okay, nice. Yeah, that makes sense because you're using your spurs. Spurred. Sure, I'm sure that's where that comes from. Surely. Okay. Wow, Chuck, you just blew my mind. What spurred this was, let's see, you made some news recently because they managed to trace spurs

His last, like, day and a half. Yeah, really, like in the past few days even. Yeah, and about 5,300 years ago, he had the same thoughts that we had when we started this podcast. He's like, it's only Tuesday, and this has been a long week already. A long, deadly, bloody week. Yeah, I've been interested in this since I saw the facial reconstruction video.

Uh, photos. Mm-hmm. Where I was like, let's see, it was, uh, Jack Palance. Chris Christopherson. Is that, oh, okay. Dude, spitting. A little bit of both. No. It's like they said, Mr. Christopherson, please come in so we can. Well, now that I think about it, Christopherson and Jack Palance are, have some similarities. If you put a beard on Jack Palance. Really? Yeah, sure. Squinty eyes.

Yeah, I guess so. Roundish face. Yeah, I guess you're right. I can see both. Christofferson, man, what a legend. Remember, yeah, look, there's Chris Christofferson. Kidding, that's Itzy. Yeah, I mean, it's me and Bobby McGee right there. Exactly. Did you see the Ken Burns documentary? No, I didn't. Not yet. You haven't yet still? No, I went to buy it the other day, and I just have not yet. So good. You got to buy that stuff, right? Yeah.

Yeah. All right, I just didn't know if there was a workaround, and you're like, oh, no, dude, here's what you do. I mean, I'll buy it. It's like $60. Oh, wow. PBS gives it away for free. What, have you got some PBS connection? No, it was on PBS for a while. Oh, do you have cable or something? See, I don't have cable. I don't even think you have to have cable. Oh, you mean like you just stream? Yes. You're up the creek. Yeah. I thought you meant, no, you don't have to have cable to get PBS. You just like...

Think positive thoughts and help people in the world. Exactly. It just beams into your eyelids. No, what I was thinking, you have to stand there and hold like a coat hanger a certain way and your TV in the other hand. Oh, sure. You can get PBS. I'm going to buy it, though. It looks great. Why not? It is good. And I would say it's worth roughly $60. It's pretty good. But anyway, Chris Christopherson figures big into one of the episodes. You're like, it's not worth more than $45. Go ahead and pay the extra $15. Right, because it goes to Kim Burns' hairdresser.

That's right, and that's quite a collection of brushes that that person has to maintain. But Chris Christopherson is interviewed, like, today. Oh, interesting. He looks exactly like Utsi now. Well, I tried to get him on Movie Crush because he played the City Winery, which is, like, attached to our building, basically. So I will try and get people from over there on the basis of, like, all you got to do is walk across the parking lot. Right. His manager emailed me back and said—

And this should hearten you as well, said, I'm actually a Stuff You Should Know fan. Nice. The manager. And said, but you know what? He doesn't really do interviews anymore. So maybe I just got the easy pass. Right. But man, I really wanted that one to come through. Yeah, that would have been cool. To have that dude in this office, it would have been pretty special. Yeah. But I'm no Ken Burns. No. Who is?

Ken Burns. Yeah, that's true. All right, let's talk. Should we take a break? Let's go back, Chuck, a little bit. Let's get in the Wayback Machine. It's been a little while. Okay. We're going to go back. We even know exactly when we're going back to. 1.30 p.m. on September 19, 1991. Whoa, 91. I'm in college.

It's a salad days. I'm wearing a Flavor Flav clock around my neck. Nice. I was a sophomore in high school.

Yeah. That's all I have to say about that. I never wore the Flavor Flav clock, but... Oh, you should have let that be. Well, I should have. I was not cool enough. But I was listening to Apocalypse 91. No, I'm saying you shouldn't have admitted that you didn't wear it. No, I know. Oh, okay. But no one believed that. They know I'm not that cool. You know, Aaron Cooper made a pretty awesome... One of my favorite ones of all time was Us as Public Enemy. And I think I'm Flavor Flav in it, but you look like Chuck D...

And it's just a cool Photoshop of us. I tried to get Chuck D on Movie Crush, too. Did he play the city winery? No, but he lives in Atlanta. Oh, I didn't know that. And at least part-time. What did he say? He didn't say anything because the management company I emailed said we don't manage him anymore. So it was just a dead end. I got you. But Chuck D, if you're listening, Pond City Market. Let's talk about your favorite movie. All right.

And also shout out to Chris Christopherson's manager. That's right, of course. All right. Oh, boy, we're going to have to go back and edit all this out. No, it's 1.30 p.m. It's September 19th, 1991, and we are hiking with Erica and Helmut Simon today.

They're German, but we are hiking in the Oatsall Alps in Italy. Yes, between Italy and Austria, like right on the border. Yeah, very close to the border. And on this peak, the Simons decided that as they were descending that they would take a shortcut. And the shortcut took them through this pass, Pastor Crevasse. And in this little shallow crevasse, they said, oh, there's a dead body. There's a corpse. And you were like, what? What?

I was. Because we were there too. Right, yeah. And I said, it's right on time, boy. Right, exactly. Yeah, that's great. So the thing is, they could see it was a cadaver. They could see the corpse's back, back of the head, arm hanging out.

And they just thought, well, we heard that there was a hiker that was recently killed, and that's probably who that is. We'll take a couple pictures and go down and tell somebody who owns, like, the nearest lodge. Right. And on the way down, you and I are going, like, that was not a hiker that was recently killed. No. Even I knew that. Like, did you see that guy? He was super old. He was a mummy. The Simons are crazy.

And the Simons were not crazy, but I'm sure they were saying the same thing. They were just out of earshot. Right. So some people went up, and I think within a day or two, they went up to try to get this

dead hiker who they thought was a dead hiker out and they did a terrible job with it. Yeah. They used ski poles to chip away at the ice. They used an ice hammer to chip away at the ice. Damaged the body. Yeah. But they think, oh, it's just like some hiker or whatever. It'll be fine. Put him in a wooden casket. And this article makes it sound like he, like the whole world or everybody who knew about this body damaged

just thought it was a modern hiker for, you know, a while until the body came down the mountains. That's not the case. One of the things that when they were getting this body out, they accidentally excavated was a copper-headed axe.

And word got out that there was an axe with this body, and that is really weird. And it was copper. Copper with, like, a wooden shaft and everything. It was clearly a very, very, very old axe. And so pretty quickly they realized that they were on to something here. For sure. And what they found out was this body—

Hi, frozen body. Yeah. One of my favorite Simpsons lines ever. That's a good one. 5,000 years old. That's the same little bit as when he goes, moon pie. Yeah. What a time to be alive. Abe. Oh, the best. No, that was... Oh, not Abe. Abe's buddy. What's his name? It'll come to me later. I'll say it. I know. People are screaming at their... I know. I can picture them with a long beard. At their old Philco's right now.

What is it? I want to say like Chauncey or Chalmers. It's not that. It's something very similar to that. I'm just going to look it up. I'm going to keep going. So they get this body out and removed it on September 23, 1991. Sealed it up, like you said. Flew it out of town in a wooden coffin to Innsbruck, the Institute of Forensic Medicine. And there was an archaeologist named Conrad Spindler there.

who said this body is at least 4,000 years old. At the very least. What's Abe's friend's name? Jasper Beardley. Jasper, right. Jasper, yeah. Of course. So they nicknamed him Ötzi because of the region of the Ötzel Alps. Very cute little name. It is. Other people call him Frozen Fritz. Oh, really? Yeah, I like Ötzi way more. Yeah, Ötzi's nice. Yeah. So...

In pretty short order, they realized that what they had just excavated in the roughest possible manner and accidentally come upon was the corpse of a 5,300-year-old body.

Yes, and when I said the guy said it was 4,000 years old, he said that was the initial like he's at least this old. Right. Yeah. But it turns out that after further study, they figured out he was actually 5,300 years old. Right. And that he lived in the Copper Age, which was a relatively brief period in human history but a really important one between the Neolithic Age –

The end of the Neolithic Age when the first farmers started to appear and the Bronze Age when the first what we consider society and civilization and history began. Right. And we know very little about this. And what these hikers had discovered was a snapshot of life during that time because Ötzi appeared to have just died where he – or fell where he died. Mm-hmm.

Or died where he fell. Yeah, it was almost there. And leaving his belongings with him, and he wasn't like a great revered figure. He wasn't buried. He wasn't prepared. He was kept intact for 5,300 years on this glacier. Yeah, that was the biggest deal because they have mummies and they have older mummies, but like you said, it's...

Their organs are removed. They're filled with, you know, embalming chemicals and things they used at the time for preservation for the afterlife and all this. So this was a really big deal to find this body just really, really scarily well-preserved. Yeah. And when we say well-preserved, it doesn't look like Chris Christopherson. Not anymore. The organs were there. And, like, didn't the red blood cells have –

Stuff inside? Still intact, yeah. It's the oldest intact blood sample ever taken, Ötzi's was. And the fact that he wasn't buried...

provides a snapshot it wasn't ritualized it was this guy was just living his life and he died and happened to be preserved perfectly so his belongings were preserved along with them and things that are organic and typically typically um decay long before 5300 years comes and goes so his clothing made of like different types of leather was preserved um his clothes

His coat or cape made of woven grasses was preserved. It was all really cool when you look at the shoes and the bearskin hat. Right. It was very cool. Bearskin hat was another one. His toolkit was preserved. All of the stuff that we had like just kind of little hints and traces and glimpses of from different like burial caches or just happened to find some artifact or whatever, this was like –

A straight up Polaroid picture of life in the copper. Yeah, it was almost like someone stumbled upon a Museum of Natural History display, but it was real. Right. You know? Well put, Chuck. You know who would have loved that analogy? Chris Christopherson. I was going to say either Jasper or Ertzi. And I don't mean would have in the fact that he's dead. I mean would have had he heard it. I agree. He's never going to hear this. You never know. I'm like using reverse psychology as a manager right now.

Well, you might as well. Willie Nelson will never listen to these either. Neither will Dolly Parton. Yeah. We want all the country legends listening. Ronnie Millsap will never hear this. Is he still with us? Sure. Okay. Not with us, though, because he doesn't listen to stuff you should know and never will.

So apparently where Ertzi actually fell was pretty lucky because it was in a very shallow crevasse. And the fact that it was kind of walled up on both sides of him kept him – if he was just out in the open, the freeze-thaw cycle over the years –

would have washed everything away and ripped him apart. Yeah. And it didn't happen because he kind of fell in this crevasse. Yeah. All 5'2", 134 pounds of him. Yeah, which is 158 centimeters and 61 kilograms. That's right. He had brown eyes. Apparently at 5'2", was even a little short for the time. But he was ripped. Yeah.

Yeah, he was pretty sturdy, you know, in his mid-40s, like we said, and really strong legs. And, you know, kind of the fun thing about this is the archaeological forensics of trying to piece together, like, what was he doing? How did he die? We'll get to all that. But just the fact that, like, he had big legs, they were like, this guy, he's probably a goat herder. He's walking up and down these mountains all the time. Right. Look at those calves. Yeah.

He looked like that guy from that One Liberty Mutual commercial. I don't know what you mean. It doesn't matter. Like 10 people just laughed. What else did he have? He had a dagger. He had that axe you were talking about. The dagger had a wicker sheath.

He had a backpack. He had a leather pouch. Yeah, the backpack, by the way, we'll never know how it worked because it got destroyed by the people who went and dug him out of the ice. He had some rudimentary snowshoes. He had a belt. He had a belt that matched his cape, right? Yeah. Oh, man. And we'll talk about that. But apparently they think that was on purpose. Yes, that he was a bit of a fashionista. Yeah.

He had a couple of vessels that were lined with maple leaves that he used to carry embers from place to place so he wouldn't have to start a fire again. And all this stuff, you're like, oh, cool, a flint dagger, cool, copper axe, oh, some embers. I think it's all cool. Yeah, I do too, but I can see people out there being like,

talk about math or something, right? The thing is, is like all this stuff that seems kind of boring and superficial has been so thoroughly studied that it's actually been used to paint a larger picture. Like we understand the Copper Age in Europe way better than we did before Ötzi was discovered just from finding the few things that he died with and him himself. He also, interestingly...

had 61 tattoos all over his body. Oh, Chuck.

I've been waiting for this day. What? You said tattoos correctly. Oh, you mean the tattoos? Oh, man. I shouldn't have said anything. So, yeah, and they covered them from head to toe in different parts, and they didn't use needles back then, obviously, but they would rub or cut the skin open and then rub charcoal inside. And they mapped them out in 2015 and organized them into 19 groups of

And they are basically, you know, like maybe three identical lines, short lines, like an inch long or like a cross, not a spiritual religious cross, but, you know. Like a plus sign? Yeah. Or like a Chinese character that has some inspirational association. Right. Perseverance or something. He had a lower back tattoo of a thorny branch. Yeah. But, yeah, they mapped these all out. And for a while they thought, and some people still think,

because they were largely found around the joints and along his back, and he had back problems, and he basically was marked up where he hurt, it looks like. Right. And they thought it might have been either acupuncture points to mark, or it might have been the acupuncture treatment itself. Right.

Right, but they do think that it had something to do with acupuncture, which in and of itself was a big revelation because they thought up to that point that acupuncture had been invented 2,000 years after Utsi and way further east in Asia. Right, but now they think that may not have been the case. No. Because they found –

a new cluster of tattoos on his chest that they didn't formally recognize. And they were like, there are no acupuncture points there and he didn't have any injuries there. So now they're, they didn't throw it out with the bathwater, but there are people now that are saying like, we don't know if that's true or not. No. Okay. So I'm really glad you said that.

Everything that we know about Ötzi, aside from the fact that he is dead, that we have a pretty good idea of when he lived, probably what his height, weight was, stuff like that. Everything else is interpretation. Sure. So you have to remember that. Educated interpretation. Super educated. And usually displaying the current understanding of history or interpretation of history or events. But it's...

It is still interpretation. That's part of archaeology, anthropology, and history, especially when you're talking about prehistory. He lived during a time before anybody wrote anything down or recorded anything, which makes it prehistoric. But just bear that in mind, that everything we're talking about and everything you go read about Ötzi is very much...

in absolute terms. Yeah. But it is our picture and image of him, how he lived, how he died, has really shaped and shifted over the years since he was discovered. And it still is. It's still malleable. Nothing is definitive. Nothing's set in ice. All right, let's take a break. It was a bad joke. We'll talk about Ötzi's health. Right after this. Ötzi's health.

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Was he healthy? I mean, he was, no. He was a person of age in his mid-40s of a time where at that age he's going to be pretty beat up. Yeah. He wasn't unhealthy in like the modern sense where he's like deliberately wrecking his health because he's eating too much junk food or something like, you know, me. Yeah.

But he was unhealthy in the way that a person would be unhealthy from living close to the land at a time before medicine had really developed. Yeah, exactly. No doctors, no dentists. So as you would imagine, he had gum disease, heart disease, Lyme disease, gallbladder stones, hardened arteries, gallstones. Yeah, the disorder is so nice, we named it twice. That's right. He had a whipworm parasite in his gut. He had H. pylori in his gut.

And all of this is to say, like you said, he was probably a pretty normal dude of the mid-40s of the time. Right. They couldn't find his stomach for a long time. It's amazing how much of this stuff...

Like it was found over the years. Like this tattoo, this new tattoo was just found a few years ago. Yeah. After like many, many years of study. His birthmark that looks like Abraham Lincoln eluded people for decades. But they couldn't even find his stomach. And they found it like, oh, here it is. 20 years later, they found it wedged up between his ribs and his lungs. Yeah. And they found it because they noticed he had gallstones. Yeah.

So they basically traced a path from the gallbladder to the stomach and said, there it is. We found it. And they were really happy they found it because when they started to dissect it or take samples from it, they found that it was full.

He died within an hour or so of eating his last meal and hadn't digested it. He had food in his colon. He had food in his intestines. He had a turtle head peeking out? Right. That's awesome. His last meal was dried ibex and deer meat.

with einkhorn wheat. Yes, and slow plums. I don't know why that wasn't mentioned. You can get that same meal in Brooklyn. Served to you by a guy with a waxed mustache and some sort of armband. An arm garter.

So, yeah, an arm garter. That's it, isn't it? Yeah, that's it. So he ate, they think, some sort of like fatty cured meat, kind of like a bacon, a cured bacon today. And the eichorn wheat was from bread. And he also ate slow plums. Gotcha. Okay. Slow plums. Yeah, that they make slow gin from.

Oh, really? Which I've never had. Have you? That's S-L-O-E, right? Yeah. Right. It's like supposedly a very tart kind of bittersh plum, but it's like loaded with vitamins. I've never had it. I remember...

It seemed like an old person drink was a slow gin fizz. Like an old person who's like 150 years old. Yes, when I lived in Arizona, all the snowbirds were down there. They drank like slow gin fizzes. Really? I've never been present when somebody ordered a slow gin fizz. Yeah. I would like to try one sometime. Sure, I'll try one. Okay.

Josh, go get us a couple of slow gin fizzes. Stat. Make it a double. I guarantee you there's a bar in this dumb building that has slow gin fizzes on the menu. Sure. With arm guarders. Can I keep the arm guarder? Comes with the drink. So let's talk a little bit more about the Copper Age, I guess. Yeah.

He had, well, we'll save his injuries for a minute here. Okay. We'll talk a little bit about his lifestyle in the Copper Age. Like you said, he was, as demonstrated by his meals, he lived a pretty, like, farmy, pleasant life down there, it seems like, but not one without conflict. Right.

You know? Sure. Based on his meals? Well, based on his meals, he lived a farming-type lifestyle, but based on injuries we're going to talk about, it seems like that, you know, he had some enemies. So from what I saw, and I mean, we used a lot of different articles, but...

National Geographic is very well represented in here, Live Science, History.com, the BBC. I came across something from the Penn, Pennsylvania, the Penn Museum or UPenn Museum, I think. They have a magazine called Expedition that was pretty awesome. It had a pretty great thing. And I saw a couple of things from historians that wrote up basically descriptions of Ötzi and Thotko.

Which is just a surprising great resource. Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever noticed? Yes. Yeah. So in one of these, I saw that it was kind of put like he lived as a farmer and enjoyed like the fruits of village life too. So things like cheese and processed grains and cereals. So bread and stuff like that. Right. And the idea is that he didn't know how to bake bread or make cheese. Right.

He was part of a village or a society where somebody knew how to bake bread and somebody knew how to make cheese. So the professions were starting to emerge. But that he also was pastoral in that like he herded sheep and that's probably what he did most of the time. And then he also lived very close to the earth, the land as well. Like his last meal was wild game, ibex and deer. Right.

and slow plums that he probably plucked himself. So he was kind of like this transitional human from the hunter-gatherer past into the agrarian agriculture-based future that spread out just ahead of him. Yeah, like just ahead of him were like real deal Italians out there baking baguettes. Well, that's French. Yeah, what do I mean? Italian bread. Yeah, in Italy they just call it bread. That's right.

I mentioned earlier that his clothes matched, and they do think, and of course, again, this is all speculation, but these garments were pretty refined, even when you look at them now. Like he had these fur skin leggings that were held up by suspenders. By Alexander McQueen. Oh, man. I went and saw that. I know. That was amazing. So good. And a great documentary on him, too. I didn't see it. It's good. And sad.

They talk about the color of the animal skin, though, and the contrasting colors they think were actually matched, like, elaborately. And he had, like you said, a sense of style. Like, you know, is that possible? Yeah. But, I mean, it seems like a lot to extrapolate that his coat and his belt matched. And so they were like, hey, he had a real personal identity. Yeah.

Whereas it could have been just like that's the materials that he had on hand that fit. That's possible. But I think what they would assert is that it has enough panache that the chances of it just being random are very unlikely or less likely than it being, you know, asserting his sense of fashion. Well, and he was Italian. That's right. So, you know.

Italians and their fashion go hand in hand. They love it. Everyone who's been to Milano knows that. Or Firenze. I remember when I was touring Europe as a youth, my friend and I laughing at the Italian guys in the hostels were like...

These 19-year-old dudes were so put together and, like, would spend so much time in the mirror wearing the cologne and getting their hair just perfect. Yeah. And we were just disgusting humans. Sure. And they got the girls. So. Yeah. Turns out that they were on to something. A little bit of extra effort really does it. And the big hair. Yeah, they were great guys, though. We met some cool Italian dudes. One of the other things, too, though, that the fact that he clearly was involved in a village, they think that he was associated with a particular village, right?

to the south in a valley near, you know, the mountains. It was things like bread and cheese that they think they found in his body. But also the fact that he did not, he obviously didn't know how to make his own tools. Somebody else had.

he probably did not know how to weave the cape he was wearing. Somebody else had done that. Yeah, they all had their specialties. Yeah, the tattoos, he couldn't have put some of them on his own body. He probably went to see a medical practitioner to do that. So, yeah, this is at a point when specialists and specialized professions are starting to emerge. Yeah, it's a really cool time. Yeah, and these are the things that we've learned from, you know, that we've gleaned from the stuff that we found with him.

I think it's just astoundingly fascinating. Yeah, it's really cool. This is a really interesting period, I think, of human development. It's also called, by the way, the Copper Age or the Chalcolithic. I like Copper Age. I do, too. Chalcolithic. Just kind of coughs out of the mouth, doesn't it? Yeah. So...

Let's talk a little bit about what might have happened to Ötzi and how he found himself dead on that mountain. Okay. Because there are quite a few theories over the years. And like you said, even this week, they have some more leads. But he was wounded. He had a really bad wound on his right hand. They found out he was right-handed too. So this was a big deal. Between his thumb and his forefinger there, that area went all the way down to the bone. But it looked like it had healed up a little bit.

So it probably happened, they said, within a few days of when he died. Right. But it was healing. But it was a big injury, like we said, because he was right-handed. But it's not the kind of thing that killed him. Like he didn't bleed out from that or anything like that. No. So it makes you think, well, what did kill him then? Right. Well, they think that might have been from a fight perhaps, that wound. That has been –

almost universally agreed upon from the outset. Right. That he probably didn't inflict that wound himself, that it seems to have been a defensive wound. Right. There was a guy named Alexander Horn who was an inspector with the Munich police. And so we should give just a little background for a second. When Ötzi was found, he was taken into Germany, down the mountain into...

or Austria, Innsbruck, Austria. And the Germans were heavily involved as well as the Austrians. And the Italians were less involved. And that's where he kind of stayed for the first few years, I think about a decade or less after he was discovered. And then eventually he was transferred to...

Italy, the Italian side. Yeah, because they were like, he's the founder on our side. Yeah. Like, just barely. I think also, I don't know if this contributed to it or if it came later, but he does seem to have been linked to the Italian side, where, like you said, he was an Italian. Right, right.

So he was transferred to Italy. And when they took custody of him, man, they pulled out all the stops. They put him up in Balzano, Italy, near about I think like 30 miles or something from where he was found. They built a museum specifically for him. Sure. An institute. Yeah.

built around studying him. And they proceeded to study him more than any other mummy has ever been studied. Probably any other body then has ever been studied in the history of the world. Yeah, for sure. And have just churned out paper after paper after paper based on their findings from him. So, but at first...

some of the ideas that we have about Ötzi and what happened to him come from the earliest interpretations posed by the Germans and the Austrians when they had custody of Ötzi. Right, which weren't necessarily right, as it turns out. No, but some may have been. But my ultimate point was everybody says from the outset that the wound in his hand

was a defensive wound that came from close combat with somebody else. That's right. For a while, they thought there was an Austrian archaeologist named Konrad Spindler that I mentioned earlier, that they sort of recreated the scene. And their contention early on was like, man, that axe is leaning up against the rock. It's propped up there. Like, we think everything is literally frozen in time from how it was. And I think that's one of the things.

that they've later refuted, right? And they said that it looks like things might have moved around some. Yeah, they think that the, what would you call it, the site, I guess, from the freeze-thaw cycle just kind of distributed, redistributed the stuff. Yeah, which, you know, it's still all valid, but it was not necessarily exactly as it was at his moment of death. Indeed. They did find his hat, though, off of his head.

as if it just like kind of fell off of his head, which might have been true. Right. So some of those early stuff, they also found what they thought were fractured ribs that had not healed. Right. So the earliest picture was this. Like they treated it like this is a dead body mystery. Where did this dead body come from? How did he die? Yeah, but well, quickly though, they also found pollen in his gut that they thought came from an autumn plant. So they were like, he died in the fall. Right, okay. Yeah.

So that's the full setup of the bad information. So the first idea, and I think it was Spindler who came up with the disaster theory, wasn't it? Yeah, I think so. Conrad Spindler said, okay, here's what happened to Ötzi. He came down from the mountain, probably herding some sheep or goats. In the fall. Went down to his village and got in an altercation with somebody, cut his hand. You looking at my wife? Right. That kind of thing. That's nice.

And he fled. Oh, and part of the altercation also resulted in some cracked ribs. Right. And either fled or left or escaped up the mountain again where he became exhausted from his cracked ribs. Right. And his cut hand. Right.

And he laid down or fell into this little shallow crevasse and died of exposure to hypothermia. That was the disaster theory. And that was, you know, I mean, they had that for a few years and somebody came along and said, I don't think that's right. That's right. Because they found out some of the things, like the site had melted some water

And then things were in different positions, they originally thought, probably. They examined the ribs again and said they were actually not fractured before he died. Yeah, that they were just a little bent. Yeah, from, like, after his death. Probably from the push of ice, the pressure from ice freezing on him again. Exactly. That'll crack your ribs in a second. Sure. Or bend your ribs. The big one, though, was what they found in an X-ray in 2001. Wow.

Right. You know what they found? Mm-hmm. Should we take a break? Oh, yeah. All right. We'll discover what they found right after this. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. Hi.

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What did they find, Chuck? They found a freaking arrowhead lodged in his shoulder, back shoulder. That was a verbatim quote from the press conference. This was a big deal. They missed it. For 10 years, they missed this thing.

And they found it, yeah, it was just a regular x-ray. And they said, wait a minute, that looks denser than bone. Yeah. What is that? It's a triangle. It's a triangle, and it was a 13-millimeter gash along a major artery in his chest. And they're like, he bled to death up there. Yeah, they said there's no way he would have survived this. It was unhealed. This is finally what killed him. So this disaster theory that he got an analgesication but ultimately died of exposure or hypothermia. Mm-hmm.

was replaced by the murder theory. Right. Which is very similar, but there's some important nuances and differences. One, so the cracked rib thing, just throw that away. Sure. That was a red herring. But the altercation is still the same. He comes down the mountain. Uh-huh. He gets in a fight of some sort. Uh-huh. Goes back up the mountain with his cut hand. Uh-huh. And while he's hanging out, maybe tending to his wound, maybe trying to figure out what to do next, whoosh,

That's my arrow impression. Message for you, sir. Yeah. Yeah. Right in the back. In the back. Right. From a distance, they think, due to the penetration from the arrowhead, from about 30 meters. Yeah. It's a good shot. That is. It is a good shot because it was a kill shot from 30 meters, 150 feet. That's a ways. Yeah. I can't quite put it into an easy analogy, but that's a long way. Yeah. Yeah.

And the fact that it was in the back, he never saw it coming. And it would have killed him pretty quickly. It was a punk move is what it was. It was. Here's the thing. Because his possessions were left intact... Mm-hmm.

And because he had that defensive wound, they think that this was the result of his death. His murder was the result of a personal conflict. There was no theft involved or anything like that. Because his copper axe alone would have been pretty valuable at the time. And somebody would have taken it had they killed him for something like robbery. Yeah. So this was a vendetta. Yes. Or at least a personal fight that happened that day. Yeah.

Yeah. Or maybe a longstanding feud. There's no way to tell. Here we reach the point where the historians and the archaeologists are like, we really can't say, but here are some ideas. Yeah, yeah. For me, it's either the person who he fought came back for revenge. I think, and this is a total guess, but I was trained in history, so I'm allowed to do this. He was... You were trained in history? Yeah, I was. I studied history in college. That's what they call it. Uh-huh.

They're like, this is how you do it. Train history camp. Right. He was successful in that hand-to-hand combat and killed the other person, whether it was offensive or defensive. I like to think it was defensive. He didn't have a choice.

But the person's family came back and killed him up on the mountain. That's the current idea. Well, not that last part that it was his family, but what I said leading up to that, everything else about that? I'm really sorry, Chris Christofferson. That's the current idea of what happened at Ötzi. I think – so you're not going with my jealous lover theory? No.

No. Okay. No, I'm not. All right. I think it was a woman with that arrow. You think a woman shot him? Yeah, jealous lover. I think he was stepping out. Oh. And he was like holding up his hands like, baby, baby, it wasn't me. Yeah. And she slices him with her implement of choice. And then dices him with the arrow. And then he's like –

This is getting too serious. You're crazy. And so he heads up the mountains, and she's like, I'll show you crazy. She turns into Glenn Close. She goes and forges an arrow. And then in that time, it took her to forge that arrow from hardened molten, you know,

Flint. Flint. Chert. Chert. He's up that hill a little bit, and she's like, no problem. Watch this. Right in the back. I like that one, too. All right. I'm going with family. Family? Because, I mean. Yeah, you know the rule. Can't trust family. Can't trust family. So, speaking of that Chert, he did not have blanks.

Yeah, so this is evidence that he didn't know how to create his own tools. Yeah, he couldn't replicate these tools, which apparently were sort of on their last legs. Yeah, that was another thing, too. So he did not have what he needed. Like, imagine if you had, like, a tool, an axe. No, a knife. Okay.

and it's made of flint, and you use it over and over and over again. It's going to get worn down. Yeah, of course. And eventually it's going to get so worn down that you just can't use it anymore. This is essentially the state of his arrowheads and his knife and some of his other stone tools in particular, that he was not in a position to defend himself with his own tools because he used them up. And I wonder if he's not making these in the village, if they're like—

Ertzis, you know, he's, have you guys noticed? He's on the way out. Like, we're not going to be making any more tools for Ertzi. Right, yeah. We don't have many. He'll just make do with what he's got. But he owes me money.

So, should we talk about moths? This was astounding to me that this happened in the last few days. Because did you pick this out before this happened? Or was it serendipity or what? No, this is what I saw that made me say it's time. Okay, I got you. So, researchers found these moth spores

that were inside of him that he had ingested and just on him and around him. 70% of the 75 species of these mosses and liverworts were not local and they basically said there's no way these would have been

been on the side of the mountain if not for him. Right, like a bird couldn't have transported it this far or something like that. Like, Ötzi brought these up here. And so in doing that, in tracing, like, these mosses and spores and everything, they have... It's a big clue. They've been able to retrace his steps that last basically 33 hours of his life, the last day and a half. And it was not a great day and a half, right?

He had his hand wound by now. By the time we're coming in here, he's already got his hand wound. It's got to be smarting. And it's a real problem for him too because even if he could make tools, he would have been really troubled to do anything because he was right-handed and that's where his wound almost down to the bone was, was in his right hand. So that's a big problem for him right there. Yeah, so what they found in his lower colon, which would have been the last,

I'm sorry, the oldest stuff that he had eaten that has not yet been... The turtle head. Yeah, not turtle headed yet, or I guess currently turtle headed. Yeah. Were pine and spruce pollen. So they said, and it's kind of neat. That's what I love about this like historical forensics. Like, oh, well, we know what was in his body and we know where that stuff is. Yeah. It's not at certain altitudes. It was a high altitude forest, around 8,200 feet deep.

And they know because of where it was in his body, this was 33 hours before he died. Right. But the middle tract of his colon, that's where all the secrets are in the colon. Yeah. You know? It had pollen from hop hornbeam. Uh-huh.

And that's stuff from lower altitudes. It's from lower altitudes, but also it grows only in the spring and summer. It decays very quickly. So it's not something that you would preserve and keep for the fall or the winter or whatever. So throw out the autumn theory. Yep. So they say he definitely died in the summer. Right. Or spring, I guess. That means that he probably descended –

maybe all the way to the bottom of the valley within 12 hours, maybe 9 to 12 hours of his death, and then all the way back up again. Right, where he was found dead. And they figured all this out. They retraced all this just from those spores and mosses. Amazing. They think maybe so he's down in the valley to begin with or in the village.

gets that hand wound, flees up to the tree line, and then they think... Because he's like the little lady who always needs a few days to cool off. Right. Oh, man, you're going to get some email for that one. I retract my right, by the way. And then he goes back down. They think to get some mosses

Because they have antibacterial properties. Yeah, you can also wrap meat in it, apparently. I guess keep it or whatever. But also, he may have wrapped his hand in it or something as well. Or maybe went and saw a doctor. Maybe. Then he goes back up to above the tree line where he dies at about 10,500 feet. That's right. And along the way, he had that last meal of ibex and deer and bread and slow plums. Pretty good meal. Not bad.

I wonder if he was panicked, if he knew, like, I'm in a bad way because of this cut on my hand and my tools and arrowheads are not in good shape. I don't know, because it's interesting. You only know that stuff from seeing it at that point in history, like...

It would have been like, boy, I've seen that kind of wound before on Tuk Tuk, and he did not last long. But if you thought somebody was coming after you, and you knew that your arrowhead was useless, and your knife was dull, and your stabbing hand was cut to the bone, you probably wouldn't have had to have seen that before to be like, oh. Probably so. Well, he was in full retreat from what it looks like, right? Yeah. And that's why he was going up that mountain. That's what most people guess. Yeah. Yeah.

So he was probably scared. Yeah, which is sad. But that's how he spent his last day and a half kind of on the run up and down the mountain, which is pretty impressive that he was able to make, you know, he went up and down the mountain. Don't forget, he was wearing moccasin stuff with grass. And he was old for the time. Sure. And he had gingivitis. Kind of a neat thing is they have found...

They found some weird markers on his male sex chromosomes, and they've actually traced some genetic relatives, at least 19 people. Living today. Yeah, in Austria. Not married, but related to Ötzi. Yeah, pretty neat. Yeah, I think so too.

So, Chuck, there's another theory that says, hey, you know your whole murder theory? It's BS. That's right. Maybe the murder part is correct, but he was murdered ritually. This isn't a vendetta or anything like that. Ötzi was buried. Right. They think that this was a ritual burial on top of a mountain. Mm-hmm.

But, you know, it's not the kind of maybe they just weren't a group that removed the organs and did that stuff, right? Yeah. So the premise of the burial theory called the social theory is that he's not a snapshot of everyday life. Right. That they didn't – that he would have been so heavily laden with all of this stuff because we didn't even say he had a bow, an arrow, rivers. Yeah, a lot of stuff. A knife. A knife.

a hatchet. He was wearing moccasins with grass and they're kind of like, seriously, that's the best they could do at this time for hiking a mountain? That's the shoes you wore? Like, those aren't mountain hiking shoes at any point in history. And the fact that...

The shaft of the arrow was removed, I think they point to as an example of the idea that he was buried, that he was killed ritually and buried in this spot. Oh, so they think the killing was a ritual killing too? Yes. Like a sacrificial killing? Yeah. Oh, I didn't get that part. And the other thing is they're saying like this stuff, these fancy Alexander McQueen leggings that he wore that were basically the predecessor of lederhosen. Mm-hmm.

That is some pretty nice stuff for a simple sheep herder to be wearing. This is what the social theory people are saying. They're like, we think this guy was actually kind of important and that he was buried here

as a sign a symbol and what they found or what they point to is that there's Stella like monoliths that were carved in the late Copper Age a thousand or two thousand years after it see because he was born at the beginning of the Copper Age yeah that are depictions of somebody dressed a lot like Utsi yeah, and they think that these are like heroes and legends ancestors and

And they're saying, this guy's wearing what these people were carving images of a thousand years later. Yeah. Maybe he was kind of important and maybe this is a burial. He also had some ornamentation too, didn't he? Yeah, like a marble bead. Yeah, which, you know, could mean something or could not. But the fact that he had so much stuff with him does kind of support the idea that maybe it was a burial. Like to send him into the afterlife with all the things he would need. Right, exactly. And then the other one is no one's ever explained anything.

how he was so well-preserved, that apparently being frozen by ice doesn't cut it. Oh, really? Yeah, that other people have been found who died far later and were in way worse states of decay than Ötzi was. But they found no, like, chemical preservation evidence or anything? No, and admittedly, both sides, if either one of them are being honest, they will say, we don't know how he was this well-preserved. Quite a mystery. Yeah.

Still to this day. As much as we know about him, he is still a mystery. He's our loving mystery man. That's right. If you want to know more about Otzi, go type O-T-Z-I in your favorite search bar, and it will bring up some fascinating stuff. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this the Accidental Iron Man. Hey, guys, big fan for a long time. I accidentally did my first Iron Man in July 2018.

And you might think, how in the world would that happen? I was thinking exactly that. Here's how that happens. I've been doing triathlons since 2015. I always planned on doing an Ironman at one point or at some point. My plan was to do a half Ironman in 2018, do the full thing in 2019. Okay. I wanted to do the Ironman Lake Placid since it's reasonably close and has a lake swim as opposed to a river or an ocean swim. Okay.

That's a hard race to get into, though, because it sells out so fast. I got an email telling me registration was open, and in my excitement, I misread it and thought it was for the half. So I signed up and realized after the fact that it was the entire 140.6 race and not the 70.3. Wow. Triathlons don't do refunds. So I paid my $800-plus entry fee and couldn't get it back. I could have deferred for a year, but I decided just to go for it.

And I finished the race in 15 hours, 2 minutes, and 43 seconds. Nice work. And that is from John Patonyak. And I emailed John back, and he's like, you want to give me a couple of little tidbits here for listener mail? And he said, sure. And he wrote back, and he said, one thing I can say is it really takes over your personal life. At my peak, I was training 20 hours a week. And he said, that is literally just pool, bike, or running. He said, doesn't count anything.

to and from the gym, cooking meals, prepping equipment. He said it's literally like a part-time job. And he said the race was a lot of fun. He said the Lake Placid course goes through the old Olympic structures from the 1980 Olympics. Oh, cool. And you finish at the finish line in the speed skating oval. Oh, that's neat. Yeah, it's pretty cool. He sent a picture. I like that. It's like urban exploration Ironman. And he said one of the cool things they do if you're a first-timer is you wear an orange wristband.

So all the volunteers and crowd will give you extra support. And it says, I will become one on it. And he said, it really works. And he said, and finally at the end, the race is so meaningful to so many people. Everyone has their own story. But almost nothing is better after a year of training than hearing you are Ironman when you cross the finish line. That's awesome. They have Ozzy singing it. I would. I would too. Who else?

I don't know. I guess Dio could. Again, that is John Petoniak. Dio is dead. Oh, is he? Yeah, Ronnie James Dio is passed on. Since when? Within the last couple of years. Okay. Yeah. One of the coolest tattoos I've ever seen. Somebody got...

Like on their arm, their forearm. Oh, I've seen that. So that when they make like the devil horns or whatever, it's Ronnie Dio making the devil horns and the person's fingers turn into... Like his arm becomes your arm. Yeah, it's really neat. It is astounding. I saw that and I thought, man, that's the coolest tattoo I've ever seen. I think it might be. It's pretty... Hats off to Chris Christopherson's manager who actually is the person with that tattoo. That's right.

If you want to get in touch with us, like, who is that? John Petoniak. Thanks, John. If you want to get in touch with us like John did, congratulations, too. You can go on to Stuff You Should Know and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Let's go places. Hi, icons. It's Paris Hilton. Check out my new single, Chasin', featuring Meghan Trainor. Out today. Hi.

I feel so lucky to collaborate with Megan and how perfectly she put my experience into words. Listen to Chasen from my new album, Infinite Icon, on iHeartRadio or wherever you stream music. Don't forget to visit InfiniteIcon.com to pre-save my album. Sponsored by 1111 Media.

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