[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JIM DICKSON: Hello there. This is Jim Dickson speaking.

SOREN WHEELER: Hello, Dr. Dickson. My name is Soren.

JIM DICKSON: Soren?

SOREN: Yes. I'm the producer for today. You'll actually be talking to our host Jad. He's on his way over to the studios right now. So ...

JIM DICKSON: That's good.

JAD ABUMRAD: All right. So let's just start the story here. This is a bit of tape we've had for a while. It's just kind of fun. It'll lead into the story in a second.

JAD: Hello, Dr. Dickson.

JIM DICKSON: Hello there, Jad.

JAD: Hi. How are you?

JIM DICKSON: I'm very well, thank you. I'm always pleased to talk about my delightful obsession.

JAD: [laughs]

JIM DICKSON: I've had for more than 10 years, which led to my marriage to a French lady. I'm not joking.

JAD: How does the marriage to the French lady factor in?

JIM DICKSON: Ah! Well, we met on email.

JAD: Huh!

JIM DICKSON: A bit like You've Got Mail, you know, the Hollywood film. Well, my wife is sitting beside me and she's making signals. Well, what is it that you're saying, dear?

JAD: Could I ask you, is there any chance we could talk to your wife? Is she sitting right there next to you?

JIM DICKSON: Yes, they want to talk to you, dear.

WIFE: Oh, yes.

JIM DICKSON: Come on.

WIFE: Hello?

JAD: Hi.

WIFE: Hi. Sorry, I am French and my English is not very excellent.

JAD: No, you're fantastic. Bonjour?

WIFE: Bonjour.

JAD: He mentioned that Ötzi was what brought you together.

WIFE: Yes, it's true. I was a teacher, a primary school teacher.

JIM DICKSON: She emailed me some questions about Ötzi.

WIFE: Yes.

JIM DICKSON: And I answered them to the best of my ability, and shortly after we were married.

WIFE: Yes!

JAD: No kidding.

JIM DICKSON: Ötzi is my benefactor, my friend.

JAD: [laughs]

JAD: Okay, so we should introduce ourselves real fast. I'm Jad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert.

JAD: This is Radiolab. So that guy, Jim Dickson, he's a botanist. Called him four years ago to talk about this fellow, Ötzi. We're gonna tell Ötzi's story completely in just a second, but there's something in the whole interaction between him and his wife there that just kind of captures how everybody gets when they get into Ötzi. They either get married or they get obsessed.

ROBERT: Yeah, but it wasn't until very recently our producer, Andy Mills, and I happened to talk to this graphic artist named Aaron Birk, who is also totally obsessed with this guy Ötzi.

AARON BIRK: Yes. I think there's this hunger on the part of the ...

ROBERT: That's when we really understood what this story is all about.

AARON BIRK: Yeah. I mean, at least for me, that's where it all started.

ROBERT: And since Andy has been reporting this piece, why don't Andy, you just take the ball from here?

ANDY: Okay.

JAD: Do it, Andy.

ANDY: So story starts 1991, way up in the Alps.

JIM DICKSON: At 3,210 meters above sea level. I know you Americans don't think in meters, that's roughly 10.5 thousand feet.

AARON BIRK: This is a frozen glacial spot.

ANDY: And up there walking around ...

JIM DICKSON: Were two hill-walkers.

JAD: Two hill-walkers. Hikers.

JIM DICKSON: Hikers. It was a German couple, a man and a wife.

ANDY: It was early in the afternoon. And at some point ...

AARON BIRK: They take a notion to the head-off trail.

JIM DICKSON: And they were only a hundred yards off the beaten track.

ANDY: And after just a few minutes, they round a little rock and that's when they were stopped dead in their tracks.

ROBERT: By what?

ANDY: By a corpse.

JIM DICKSON: This corpse sticking out of the ice. He was lying on his stomach.

ANDY: Face-down in the ice.

JIM DICKSON: He was kind of draped over a big boulder.

AARON BIRK: His legs are buried under the ice up to his hips, and his top half is just sticking out.

ANDY: His left arm is under his forehead, almost like a schoolboy falling asleep in class on his arm.

AARON BIRK: So these two hikers, they see this and they run off for help.

JIM DICKSON: They hot footed it into the nearby mountain hut, thinking it was a mountaineering accident.

ANDY: A recent one.

JIM DICKSON: And they called the police.

ANDY: They said, "Hey. Somebody, a tourist or a climber, had some sort of accident." And so the cops showed up with drills and ice picks and started to chip away at the ice, trying to get the body out. But then they started noticing some things. Like this guy had all these tattoos.

JIM DICKSON: On his back and behind his knees.

ANDY: Then they start noticing all this stuff buried with him. He's got some kind of moccasin, looks like ox skin.

JIM DICKSON: He had a bearskin cap.

ANDY: Unusual stuff.

JIM DICKSON: He had a copper headed u-hafted ax.

JAD: A what?

ANDY: A small pouch filled with medicinal tree fungus

ROBERT: Really?

JIM DICKSON: A quiver full of arrows. A longbow.

ANDY: He had grass socks.

ROBERT: Grass socks?

ANDY: Mm-hmm. Woven grass.

AARON BIRK: A dagger that has been chipped out of stone.

ANDY: And so these cops realize ...

AARON BIRK: This is not a 20th-century tourist who wandered off-trail.

JIM DICKSON: This was something extraordinary.

ANDY: This is old.

ROBERT: Like renaissance or old middle ages? Or old?

JIM DICKSON: Well, wouldn't we like to know?

JAD: And what did the police do?

JIM DICKSON: Well, the police reported it to the forensic authorities in the University of Innsbruck.

ANDY: Basically, they took it to a team of local scientists who sent samples out to a bunch of labs and eventually confirmed that yeah, this is old. But not just old, this was really old. This body is 5,300 years old.

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: Wow!

JIM DICKSON: Yes.

ANDY: That's way before Jesus, way before Moses.

AARON BIRK: If you had to use it as a historic mark point, let's say the pyramids of Egypt. This would be 700 years prior to the construction of the pyramid in Giza.

JIM DICKSON: It was beyond archeologists' wildest dreams. A 5,200-year-old perfectly preserved corpse.

ANDY: We're talking about a man with all his skin, with his eyeballs, his teeth, his tongue, his groin, his organs, his guts. Everything's in there. Everything is almost perfectly freeze-dried.

JIM DICKSON: There he is!

JAD: So what does he look like?

JIM DICKSON: Oh. Well, he was bearded.

ANDY: He's 45 years old, which I think for 3,000 BC is pretty darn old.

ROBERT: Huh.

JIM DICKSON: And he was a small guy. He was only about 5'2" in height.

AARON BIRK: But his calf muscles, his thigh muscles are incredibly developed. So this would suggest that he's a hunter or a shepherd of some kind who walks these mountains.

JIM DICKSON: His physique is comparable to the modern Olympian wrestler. He's very obviously a human being. Very very obviously. And he would have all the hopes and the fears of you and I.

ANDY: They even gave him a name.

JIM DICKSON: Ötzi.

AARON BIRK: Ötzi.

ANDY: Ertsy.

JIM DICKSON: Ötzi.

AARON BIRK: Even though some of us can't really pronounce that name.

ANDY: Ötzi.

JAD: Spell it.

ANDY: O with two dots on top.

[SIRI: Scientists call him Ötzi.]

AARON BIRK: There's all kinds of drama. There's Austria competing with Italy. "He's our mummy." "No, he's our mummy." "He's on the border." "Whose mummy is he?"

ANDY: Eventually the Italians got him.

JIM DICKSON: Because he's said to be 92 meters inside Italy.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANDY: A whole museum is built around him. An entire facility is built to freeze him. There's teams of researchers, there's competing universities. You have documentaries, you have books and articles about this incredible mummy who was walking in the ice, he fell. Isn't that fascinating?

JAD: You know Brad Pitt?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: He got a tattoo of Ötzi on his arm.

ROBERT: Really?

ANDY: What everyone really wanted to know was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Who was this prehistoric person?

ANDY: ... who was this guy?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Where'd he come from?

ANDY: Was he a scout? Was he a traveler?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Where was he going?

ANDY: How did he fall?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: How had he died?

ANDY: Was it a storm that took him?

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And what was he doing so high in the mountains?]

ROBERT: [laughs]

ANDY: Yeah. But when we found him there really wasn't any way to answer these kinds of questions, all you got was wild speculation. But this is where it becomes more than a story about an ancient dead guy. Over the past, what, 22 years since he's been found, all these researchers keep coming back to Ötzi. And they've gathered just enough little pieces of evidence that when you put it all together, what you get is this surprisingly intimate look at this one real person—like this one real dude who lived 5,300 years ago. And for our purposes, the first piece of that puzzle falls into place on a summer's day in 2001, when a radiologist named Dr. Paul Gossner is staring at a CT scan. Basically a 3D X-ray of Ötzi chest. Maybe for the umpteenth time, for the thousandth time. When suddenly he notices something unusual. Right up by Ötzi's shoulder blade, in the left scapula.

ROBERT: What does he notice?

ANDY: He finds an arrowhead lodged in the shoulder blade. And I think it was hard to see because it's stone, not metal. If it was metal, they would've picked it up right away.

ROBERT: So wait, does this mean that this is a possible murder?

ANDY: That's right. The whole thing blows up to a full-scale murder mystery.

ALBERT ZINC: From that moment on, we knew that he was shot with an arrow. And then it all started the research about ...

ANDY: That's Albert Zinc. He's actually the top scientist in charge of Ötzi these days.

ALBERT: ZINC: What we do is like doing a crime scene investigation. We try to put together ...

ANDY: Not too long after Gossner spotted that arrowhead, Zinc and his team, they take Ötzi, they actually put him into an ambulance, rush him as fast they can to a hospital, trying to make sure that he doesn't thaw. And they put him into a higher resolution full-body CT scan.

AARON BIRK: And the plot thickens further. We find severe abdominal wounds and rib fractures.

ANDY: Things that before may have come across as 5,000-year-old wear and tear ...

AARON BIRK: There's an orbital fracture of the cranium.

ANDY: ... now it's like we're seeing them with new eyes.

AARON BIRK: His head is busted.

ANDY: And not only that ...

JIM DICKSON: His right palm is very badly cut. It's very deep.

ANDY: How deep?

AARON BIRK: It's so deep that there's cuts in the underlying bones.

ANDY: Oh.

JIM DICKSON: And some pathologists say it's a defensive wound.

ALBERT ZINC: A wound that comes from a fight.

JIM DICKSON: He held his right hand up, and he got slashed on his right palm.

ANDY: In trying to piece together what happened, one of the questions that scientists like Albert Zinc asked was, like, "This cut on his hand was it a ...

ALBERT ZINC: Fresh wound, or this was already a healing wound?

ANDY: How much time had passed between when he got the cut and when he died?

ALBERT ZINC: Well, w took a little tissue piece out of the wound.

ANDY: They rehydrated it. They sliced it up with lasers.

ALBERT ZINC: We made little slices, and we have a look at them in the microscope.

ANDY: And they could see evidence that when he died, the blood from this wound was just starting to clot, but that it had not yet formed a scab when he died, which told them that this attack ...

ALBERT ZINC: This must be a wound that happened already three or four days before he died.

ANDY: Which added another question to the list: what happened in those last three or four days between the time he got cut and the time he died?

JIM DICKSON: Well I mean, I think this is the most fascinating thing of all about Ötzi.

ANDY: Jim told us, luckily for scientists ...

JIM DICKSON: His intestines are all there.

ANDY: And to the trained eye, your intestines ...

JIM DICKSON: It's like a map and a diary.

JAD: A diary?

JIM DICKSON: Yeah, a diary.

JAD: In what way?

JIM DICKSON: If there's any food in your stomach, it's less than four hours old.

ANDY: Which would probably be your last meal.

JIM DICKSON: And the stuff in an intermediate position like the colon is between a few hours old and a few days old.

ANDY: Your last few meals.

JIM DICKSON: So if you can get samples from all these and look at the content, you can deduce all sorts of things.

ANDY: But one small problem. If you've got a 5,000-year-old mummy on your hands, you can't exactly just cut them open. So Jim and his team, what they did is they snaked some fancy equipment up his butt and started rooting around.

JIM DICKSON: I mean, I didn't do that, you appreciate. I'm a botanist, I'm not a medic.

ANDY: Someone else from his team did that. In any case, they got up in there. And first of all, they couldn't find the stomach, but they did pull out samples from the rest of his guts, and they found ...

JIM DICKSON: Pollen.

ANDY: Pollen.

AARON BIRK: Pollen.

ANDY: Actually, two kinds of pollen, one from ...

AARON BIRK: From the fresh flowers of the hop-hornbeam.

JIM DICKSON: Yes.

ANDY: A tree that blooms down in the valley. And ...

AARON BIRK: Conifer pollen.

ANDY: A second pollen from high-altitude evergreen trees. So you've got the high mountain firs.

ROBERT: Yes?

ANDY: And the deciduous trees of the valley, of the low places. You've got the hornbeam. Both of these kinds of pollen were found in Ötzi's gut, probably because he drank some water, which contained the pollen. But here's the key: the pollen from the valley, it's sandwiched in between these two layers of mountain pollen, and that implies an order. Ötzi must have first ingested the pine pollen, then the hornbeam, and then the pine pollen again, and that suggests ...

JIM DICKSON: About two days or so before he died, he was high up in hills.

ANDY: Drinking pollen-laded water, high above.

JIM DICKSON: And then he was very low down below the tree line.

ANDY: Drinking pollen-laded water down below.

JIM DICKSON: And then he came back up again to meet his end.

ANDY: And so taking all that and a couple other pieces of research, here is what we think happened to Ötzi in his last days. We know that it would have been summertime.

JIM DICKSON: Probably June.

ANDY: Because that hornbeam pollen in his gut ...

AARON BIRK: Only blooms in the early summertime, in June.

JIM DICKSON: And for whatever reason ...

ANDY: Maybe he's hunting, maybe he's looking for copper, we don't know. But we do know ...

JIM DICKSON: He's high up in the mountains, right?

ANDY: Well above the tree line.

JIM DICKSON: And then he goes back down to his village.

ANDY: Which we believe was south of the mountain because certain chemicals in the local water were also found in Ötzi's teeth and bones. Anyway, it was not a short walk home.

JIM DICKSON: It's a long way down, it's 5,000, 6,000 feet we're talking about.

ANDY: Then we know that within the span of about 24 hours ...

JIM DICKSON: Something happens in his village.

ANDY: Something violent.

ALBERT ZINC: Maybe his people were fighting with other people when he got there.

ANDY: The details are a little blurry, but it is clear that he was attacked, that he put his right hand up to defend himself, and that he gets that cut.

JIM DICKSON: It's very deep, it's very bloody, it's very painful. And shortly after that event, he bends down and picks up a clump of bog moss.

ANDY: Jim actually found that bog moss on Ötzi, and he says that it's ...

JIM DICKSON: It's mildly antiseptic.

ANDY: Anyway, Ötzi, he heads back up the mountain.

JIM DICKSON: He goes back up again, perhaps pursued by somebody or people, plural.

ANDY: We think that maybe he was in a hurry because ...

JIM DICKSON: Of 14 arrows ...

ANDY: That he was carrying ...

JIM DICKSON: Only two had flint tips and feathers, and the other 12 were useless.

AARON BIRK: Which suggests a frantic state. You've got a guy who's running, bleeding and he's busily carving his arrows.

ANDY: Curving as he runs. And for about a day ...

JIM DICKSON: Or maybe a day and a half ...

ANDY: He's running a lot. We know that he runs over 12 miles, that he gets up above 10,000 feet above sea level, managing to evade whoever it is that's coming after him. But then ...

JIM DICKSON: The fatal arrow shot.

AARON BIRK: This is the official report from the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology. We can see that the point of the arrow tore a hole in the artery beneath his left collarbone, which led to a massive hematoma, which bled into the thorax cavity, which in turn caused cardiac arrest and sudden death.

ANDY: He bled to death.

JIM DICKSON: He would have died in less than half an hour.

JAD: Really?

JIM DICKSON: He would have died in 20 minutes, perhaps.

ANDY: According to a lot of researchers, whoever killed Ötzi, came over, pulled the arrow shaft out of Ötzi's back, picked up a big stone and bashed his head in. And then within about an hour, maybe two, his body would have been completely covered in snow. Then within a month or so, that snow would have become ice. And then when the next summer came around, that ice would have thawed out just enough to allow a little sunlight to come through. The next winter, he would have froze again, following summer thawed a little bit, and then froze again and then thawed. And here's why that's important: bodies that are completely frozen deteriorate. Those periods of thaw kept him from deteriorating. So you had this perfect mixture throughout all these years: a season of snow, a season of ice, and then a thaw, and then a snow and then an ice, and then a thaw. I mean, just think about it: year in and year out, throughout the building of the pyramids, the rise and fall of Rome, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, all of this time, Ötzi was there in that spot, just a few feet away from where he was murdered, until 1991, when a couple of German hikers decided to head off trail.

AARON BIRK: We have forensic proof of his suffering. We have forensic proof of his hunger. We have forensic evidence that he was cold. We have all of this undeniable, irrefutable forensic evidence that this man was a living human being who was tormented and was enduring with incredible tenacity.

ANDY: And in the last few years, scientists have still been at it. They've still been poking at Ötzi, trying to figure out who was this guy? Not just who might have been, but who was he really?

AARON BIRK: I think there's a hope that something will be found, which will say yes, he was a hero. Yes, he was a king. Yes, he was a father. I think there's this hunger on the part of the researchers to find something beyond the biology, beyond the molecular chemistry, to find some sense of the humanity.

ANDY: And in the years since we spoke with Jim Dickson, scientists did find something which, for Aaron, at least does give him that sense.

AARON BIRK: In 2010 ...

ANDY: They found Ötzi's stomach. Which Jim and his team, they couldn't find because it was ...

AARON BIRK: Tucked deep up under his rib cage, pressed up against his heart. They find the stomach.

ANDY: And inside ...

AARON BIRK: One and a half pounds of undigested goat meat and bread in his belly.

ANDY: ... his last meal.

AARON BIRK: This was eaten on the day of his death.

ANDY: Maybe just an hour before he died.

AARON BIRK: It was a huge feast.

ANDY: And for Aaron, imagining Ötzi's sitting at that fire right before he died, that's what did it.

AARON BIRK: Oh, I can see it! He's eating. He cooked his food. We have proof. He cooked the meat and he sat down and it must've taken time, it took at least an hour or two. Like, I can feel it. I'm in the cave. I'm by the fire.

ANDY: That's what brought him back.

ROBERT: So you're saying then that some hours before he had somehow the time to build a fire, catch or acquire or carry a fairly substantial meal and sit and eat it somewhat at rest. He must not have known what was coming was coming.

ANDY: Well, maybe he knew. Maybe he had found some kind of resolution around it, but we have forensic proof that for this brief moment in time, the Alpine ice man felt safe enough to stew his meat and his bread and sit by the fire and eat his dinner.

ANDY: Before we go, two brief notes: first, Robert and Jad will be back from our live show tour by our next podcast. And if you want to see them this week in either Portland or Seattle, go to our website, Radiolab.org/live. Second, a friend of the show, a novelist named Stefan Block. He heard about this guy Ötzi, got obsessed, but unlike Brad Pitt, instead of getting a tattoo, he wrote a fictional piece that tries to answer some of those remaining questions, like, why was Ötzi pursued? Who was after him? Why did they kill him? You'll soon be able to find that piece along with a lot of other great stuff on our website, Radiolab.org. And of course, thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: This is Bonnie, calling from Boston, Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

 

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