Saturday, November 19, 2011

Iceman Ötzi

No, not DJ Ötzi, a very cool guy in his own right, but instead a very-well preserved body of a man who lived in the Tyrolean Alps 5300 years ago, and was uncovered in melting ice in 1991.

I watched a National Geographic special about a project to learn from Ötzi's corpse. It's amazing to see how much information can be gleaned from careful study: where he was from and where he lived, what he ate, his health and even his social status. Today, he has his own museum.

However, the most interesting tidbit of news to me was that DNA tests showed that our prehistoric traveler to have also been infected with Lyme disease. Just goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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