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| credits Nova Online |
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| The Iceman on examination table. |
| The Iceman's Last Meal |
| The Iceman did not die on a full stomach. Eight hours before his death on a barren Alpine pass, he was in the valley to the south, in what is today Italy's Schnals Valley. There, according to Dr. Klaus Oeggl, a botanist from the University of Innsbruck who recently examined his gut contents, the man took his last meal, not long before setting out on a hike from which he was never to return. The meal was a simple affair, consisting of a bit of unleavened bread made of einkorn wheat, one of the few domesticated grains used in the Iceman's part of the world at this time, some other plant, possibly an herb or other green, and meat. |
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| Oeggl reconstructed the Iceman's last meal from his microscopic analysis of a tiny sample removed from the mummy's transverse colon, the part of the intestine just beyond the stomach. When the Iceman was discovered in 1991, x-rays and CAT-scans of the corpse revealed that his internal organs had shrunken so drastically in the 5,300 years in the glacier that Dr. Dieter Zur Nedden, the radiologist who examined the images, could barely distinguish them. Instead of filling the chest cavity with their billowy white form, the lungs looked like wisps of clouds. |
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| But at the top of the colon, Zur Nedden made out a slight bulge, which the radiologist suspected was a clump of half-processed food. The progress of the food indicated that the Iceman had last eaten about eight hours before he died, possibly of hypothermia, on the Hauslabjoch pass, which cuts over the main Alpine ridge dividing Austria from Italy at 10,500 feet above sea level. Not until several years after the discovery did the Innsbruck scientists finally cut a hole into the mummy, insert an endoscope, and snip out about .004 ounces from the colon. Dr. Werner Platzer, the University of Innsbruck anatomist then in charge of research on the corpse, gave .0016 ounces milligrams of the material to Oeggl, who had already been studying the rich botanical finds from the site. |
| Preparing the Iceman for a CAT scan. |
| Oeggl's sample was barely the size of his little fingernail. Under the microscope, he quickly identified the flake-like, semi-digested material that made up the bulk of the sample as einkorn, the most important wheat of the Neolithic, the period of prehistory in which people lived in semi-permanent settlements and survived by agriculture and keeping animals. The discovery of einkorn, which does not occur naturally in Europe, in the Iceman's intestinal tract suggested that he had contact with an agricultural community. The dominance of bran in the sample led Oeggl to believe that the wheat had been finely ground into meal and made into bread, rather than eaten as a porridge, where the grains would have been eaten whole and found in larger pieces in the colon. But the bread would have been little like modern breads. In order to get bread to rise when yeast is added, the wheat grains must contain a high level of gluten, which lends the dough a durable elasticity and therefore holds the pockets of air. Einkorn has low levels of gluten, so the bread made with it was probably hard, somewhat like a cracker, and rather tough on the teeth. |
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| Using an electron microscope Oeggl also spotted tiny particles of charcoal attached to the bran, probably remnants of the baking process on a hot rock, or next to a fire. In addition to the einkorn, the cells of at least one other plant, possibly some herb, were present in the sample, and Oeggl concluded that they, too, had been part of his meal. He also found a tiny muscle fiber and a burned bit of bone, evidence that the Iceman might also have eaten a meat. What kind of meat Oeggl cannot yet say, nor can he determine how much of the meal the sample represented. |
| Three grains of Ostrya carpinifolia (Hophornbeam) pollen magnified 1600x. |
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