
Surprising Facts About Otzi the Iceman - Turing_Machine
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131016-otzi-ice-man-mummy-five-facts/
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redstripe
"The 40-something's list of complaints include... hardened arteries,
gallstones..."

Stuff like this makes me wonder how much of current health scares about modern
diets (HFCS, glutton, carbs, dairy, GMOs, bad food of the month) should be
taken seriously. The narrative presented is often that our bodies aren't
suited to modern diets and people used to be a lot more healthy. It's too bad
we don't have more long dead guys to fill the research gap.

~~~
danmaz74
Oetzi was clearly the victim of dehumanizing, evil modern technologies, like
agriculture and metallurgy...

~~~
jere
Nice sarcasm, but...

>he had alarming levels of arsenic in his system (probably due to working with
metal ores and copper extraction)

Also, the argument here that "since he wasn't eating a modern diet and still
had health problems, we can't blame health problems on our modern diet" is
somewhat silly. Diets like paleo are clearly against grains, which Otzi
definitely ate (for all we know, that was most of his diet [1]... this guy was
alive long after the advent of agriculture).

Paleo (and similar diet) proponents would tell you that the cause of his
gallstones and bad teeth were a high grain diet. To be clear, I'm not arguing
that those claims are accurate, only that the logic in the OP doesn't directly
counter such claims.

Furthermore, the short life expectancy argument already being trotted out in
this thread is pure bull. Life expectancy, which was mainly low due to infant
mortality, dropped when agriculture was introduced and didn't recover until
last century:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time)

[1] [http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/04/lessons-
from-o...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/04/lessons-from-otzi-
tyrolean-ice-man-part_17.html)

~~~
bane
The figures provided in WP are for a 1961 Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB).
Modern studies of contemporary primitive people groups shows markedly
different life expectancy figures and reasoning. For example the neolithic
life expectancy drop is now not considered to have been as severe attributed
to communicable diseases introduced by domesticating livestock not grain
introduction -- I'd add that our sample size of Neolithic dead people is also
pitifully small.

Another easy to research example, we know from historic records that life
expectancy in 19th century Ireland was near the top of the table you provided
in WP, but was considered quite low for the time period in Western Europe.
Other data shows that by 1900 U.S. life expectancy was already ~50 which is
almost double the figure provided by EB.

Another way to think about it is, unless humans rapidly developed an ability
to handle grains in the last couple hundred years, life expectancy should
still be at or around historic numbers, not at around double. People should
still be dropping dead from diets of grains, but they don't. So an external
causal agent _other_ than grains (livestock domestication, introduction of
alcohol, large scale warfare, highly virulent diseases) must be the logical
conclusion.

The figures are off for Classical Rome as well. Depending on your social class
life expectancy was around 40 for the lower classes and around 60 for the
upper classes. Other studies show that if a child made it through their first
5 years, they could be expected to live to around 50 regardless of social
class. It wasn't considered unusual to see people in their 60s and even early
70s even if the percentage of population in those ages was much smaller than
today. But of course documentation isn't very good either leading to those
conflicting figures.

Another case, Australia spent about 30 years trying to get the life expectancy
of Aboriginals up to any kind of reasonable number. I believe the gap when
they started studying it was about 20 years. Grains were not causing non-
Aboriginals to drop dead before their Aboriginal hunter gatherer neighbors.

I'm generally suspicious of any expectancy tables for any population that
don't start at around 35-40 for any time period. Numbers lower than that are
almost always the cause of a catastrophic external factor like the Black
Death. There are pitifully few well documented populations where life
expectancy isn't at least in the 40s. This goes for hunter gatherer tribes to
the most war-torn inhospitable genocide suffering places on the planet with
access to virtually no healthcare and unbelievable infant mortality rates but
plenty of grains.

The introduction of a staple bearing diet had little effect on life expectancy
numbers directly, but enabled other advances which did.

~~~
jere
Excellent comment. I agree with pretty much everything and wasn't trying to
say grains lowered life expectancy, rather just fighting against the notion
that life expectancy has constantly increased since we were hunter gatherers.

Again, I wasn't trying to argue for this, but I wouldn't discount diet as a
factor completely. I've heard it suggested that some of the first agricultural
societies were extremely malnourished because they depended too heavily on
grains. Obviously, they didn't have fortified foods or supermarkets like we do
today. I don't see why an extreme malnutrition (in vitamins/minerals, not
calories) couldn't be a factor.

~~~
bane
I agree with malnutrition. In fact, many modern societies are malnourished due
to lack of vitamins/minerals in the local staple. It's one of the reasons
flour and cereals are usually "fortified". And in Asia, significant R&D
efforts are not unusual to get rice to be more nutritious based on
deficiencies in the local population. [1]

The problem I have is that grains are pointed to be alternative diet folks as
some kind great evil _by itself_ based on dubious claims around
unsubstantiated reasoning. Like I said, some external factor is more likely
the issue.

[http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveNutrition/Challenges/N...](http://www.grandchallenges.org/ImproveNutrition/Challenges/NutrientRichPlants/Pages/Rice.aspx)

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shmageggy
> "the Iceman and those 19 share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000
> to 12,000 years ago," Parson said.

For us hackers and compsci people who are used to thinking about the rates of
growth and binary trees, it shouldn't be surprising that the most recent
common ancestor of _all_ humans has been estimated to have lived less than 10k
years ago. Wikipedia has a nice article on it --
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor)

~~~
jbattle
How is that 10K date even possible? If the first migration to the americas
happened ~16K years ago - then there were populations isolated for at least
that long. Aboriginal Australians reached Australia something like 40K years
ago. It's not hard for me to imagine that there is at least _one_ Aboriginal
Australian who's ancestry is ... what's the right word ... does not contain
any Europeans.

This is a case where the objection to the argument presented in the article is
so obvious to me I feel like I'm missing something. (wouldn't be the first
time!) It almost sounds like they wrote a computer program that was seriously
abstracted and when run it spit out "3000 BP" and now "they" are interpreting
that result literally.

~~~
chattoraj
The Wikipedia page actually agrees with you, more or less.

See the "MRCA of all living humans" section:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMR...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_recent_common_ancestor#TMRCA_of_all_living_humans)

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njharman
My first thought (before even reading rest of sentence) on the tattoos over
pain prone areas was that they were charms, spells, etc. to alleviate the
pain. Not acupuncture. rubbing charcoal into lacerations is not how one does
acupuncture.

~~~
KMag
> Rubbing charcoal into lacerations is not how one does acupuncture.

Nit: charcoal was probably rubbed into incisions, not lacerations. Tearing
flesh instead of using a sharp instrument is probably too hard-core, even for
Otzi.

Also, if tearing the flesh and rubbing charcoal in isn't how acupuncture is
done, my aromatherapist is about to receive a VERY sternly worded email.

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julienchastang
A couple of decades later this story continues to fascinate me. I wonder if
there is a list of scholarly journal articles that have originated from this
one discovery. It has to number in the hundreds or beyond.

~~~
tokenadult
Yes, there are many papers about Ötzi listed on Google Scholar.

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%C3%96tzi](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%C3%96tzi)

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madaxe
Hey, _I_ have those abnormalities. Missing M1s, and missing ribs. And I have
Austrian ancestry. Damn, if only I could sequence my genome at home.

~~~
apaprocki
You can always go to ftdna.com and order the 111 Y test -- you can also talk
to the project coordinator for your haplotype and for $800 or so do a walk-
the-Y to sequence many kbp of your Y. The base test is much cheaper and would
at least indicate if you're in the same ballpark.

~~~
madaxe
Yeah, but I've absolutely no wish to hand my DNA over to the NSA, so until I
can sequence at home, it's out of the question!

~~~
apaprocki
You aren't transmitting your genome over the Internet or anything like that
because the bits of DNA that you are thinking about are never sequenced. Your
DNA gets sent to a university medical facility and only the Y/mtDNA are
sequenced there. Those bits of sequenced information are basically useless for
any of the scary situations you're imagining. The medical lab turning over
your actual DNA would be akin to your doctor turning over your DNA to a
government agency. Are you going to stop seeing doctors too?

