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L’héritage débattu de Lucy, la plus célèbre des australopithèques

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ANALYSE. Cinquante ans après la découverte du fossile, sa place dans l’histoire de l’humanité est toujours discutée, alors que dans l’intervalle d’autres espèces d’homininés ont agrandi la photo de famille.

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Au Maroc, découverte d’un complexe agricole vieux de 5 000 ans, l’un des plus anciens et des plus vastes d’Afrique

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L’identification à Oued Beht d’un site préhistorique de production de céréales et de céramiques bouscule les connaissances sur le degré de complexité du Nord-Ouest africain à la fin du néolithique et sur ses interactions avec la péninsule Ibérique.

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Le Néolithique marque-t-il un tournant dans l’histoire de l’humanité ? L’heure est à la remise en question, au moins partielle, de ce récit consensuel. Les récents ouvrages de James C. Scott et Pie…

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How prehistoric humans modified their environment : the case of the Natufians

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How prehistoric humans modified their environment : the case of the Natufians

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Finding food : the case of the Natufians

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Finding food : the case of the Natufians

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Lost Humans - What Happened to our Prehistoric Forebears? | Free Documentary History

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Seven Million Years of Human Evolution #datavisualization

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An animated map shows humans migrating out of Africa to Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Subjects

Anthropology, Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, World History

The video above is from the January 2013 iPad edition of National Geographic magazine.

Groups of modern humans- Homo sapiens -began their migration out of Africa some 60,000 years ago. Some of our early ancestors kept exploring until they spread to all corners of Earth. How far and fast they went depended on climate, the pressures of population, and the invention of boats and other technologies. Less tangible qualities also sped their footsteps: imagination, adaptability, and an innate curiosity about what lay over the next hill.

Today, geneticists are doing their own exploring. Their studies have led them to a gene variation that might point to our propensity for risk-taking, movement, change, and adventure. This gene variant, known as DRD4-7R, is carried by approximately 20 percent of the human population. Several studies tie 7R (and other variants of the DRD4 gene) to migration. (Genetics is complex, however. Different groups of genes interact and yield diverse results in different individuals. DRD4-7R probably influences, not causes, our tendency toward "restlessness.")
Teaching Strategies
Review "The Global Human Journey" video, then discuss geography and genetics as posed by queries in the "Questions" tab.

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Writers

Caryl-Sue Micalizio, National Geographic Society

Sean P. O'Connor, BioBlitz Education Consultant

Editor

Caryl-Sue Micalizio, National Geographic Society

Page Producer

Sean P. O'Connor, BioBlitz Education Consultant

In Partnership With

National Geographic Magazine

other

Last Updated

October 19, 2023

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An animated map shows humans migrating out of Africa to Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

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For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

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Learn how early humans evolved from Homo habilis, to Homo erectus, to Homo sapiens and developed basic survival tools.

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Néandertal - Le mystère de la grotte de Bruniquel | ARTE

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Homo sapiens, les nouvelles origines | ARTE

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​This unit is designed to examine the origin, rise, and fall of the ancient/classical civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, China, Greece and Rome. Students will examine the various cultural mechanisms that these societies used to reach their golden ages. Activities will focus on political, economic and cultural achievements of these civilizations. Students will consider how conflict and change helped create and destroy the civilizations. At times that conflict was between societies; at times the conflict was within the society. Students will learn how these civilizations created the rich cultures whose legacies continue to affect the world. An examination of the origins of world religions will help students understand diversity, conflict, and tolerance in the ancient and modern world. The study of governance will enable students to examine how more and more complex governments were needed to meet the needs of more advanced civilizations. Students will understand how individuals, groups and institutions affected societies in both positive and negative ways. Students will examine how movement and migration of various peoples influenced societal change.
WH.H.2 - Students will be able to analyze ancient civilizations & empires in terms of their development, growth, and lasting impact.
2.1: Compare how different geographic issues of the ancient period influenced settlement, trading networks and the sustainability of various ancient civilizations (e.g., flooding, Fertile Crescent, confluence, limited fertile lands, etc.).
2.2: Analyze the governments of ancient civilizations in terms of their development, structure and function within various societies (e.g., theocracy, democracy, oligarchy).
2.3: Explain how codifying laws met the needs of ancient societies (e.g., Hammurabi, The Twelve Tables, etc.).
2.4: Analyze the rise and spread of various empires in terms of influence, achievements and lasting impact (e.g., Mongol, Mughal, Ottoman, Ming, Mesoamerica, Inca, imperial states in Africa, etc.).
2.5: Analyze the development and growth of major Eastern and Western religions (e.g., Including but not limited to Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, etc.).
2.7: Analyze the relationship between trade routes and the development and decline of major empires (e.g. Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Greece, Rome, China, Mughal, Mongol, Mesoamerica, Inca, etc.).
2.8: Compare the conditions, racial composition, and status of social classes, castes, and slaves in ancient societies and analyze changes in those elements.
2.9: Evaluate the achievements of ancient civilizations in terms of their enduring cultural impact.

​

​1. How did physical geography influence the settlement of humans and lead to the development of agriculture?
2. How did new civilizations create order, prosperity, and sustainability?
3. Why do civilizations collapse?
4. What achievements of the ancient world left the most enduring significant impact?

​

​1. Early human societies began the process of overcoming the limitations of their physical environment.
2. The beginning of agriculture and permanent settlements was a major step in the advancement of civilization.
3. Ancient civilizations left an enduring cultural impact through their achievements.
4. Different forms of government and law codes developed over time to meet the needs of diverse societies.
5. Trade among ancient civilizations enabled societies to flourish and expand economically, politically, and geographically.
6. Early humans were nomadic, hunters and gatherers whose survival depended on the availability of wild plants and animals.
7. The Neolithic Revolution brought about the rise of settled communities through the domestication of plants and animals, the agricultural revolution, and development of advanced tools.
8. The eight Features of civilization: cities, organized central government, complex religions, job specialization, social classes, ability to write, the arts, architecture and public works.
9. Civilizations developed in Mesopotamia, Indus River Valley, Egypt, China, Ghana, Greece, Rome, and Mesoamerica.
10. Geographic issues such as flooding, natural barriers, drought, famine, and limited fertile land influenced the settlement, trade interactions, and sustainability of ancient civilizations.
11. River valleys provided fertile soil and irrigation for agriculture.
12. Locations were easily protected from invasion by nomadic people
13. Development and diffusion of religion through trade, war, and evangelism. Major religions of this time include: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam

​

​Does an eye for an eye create a cradle of civilization or a fertile crescent???
1. Who are the Ancient Mesopotamians? , , ,
2. Who is Hammurabi and what is his code? ,
3. Historic Contributions: , , base 60 system ,
4. Architecture, Polytheism and Art: , Ziggurrats , , small group discussion
5. If any time remains, click the picture to the left

Project - Students will create a poster of their choice covering the following topics:
1. The Aztecs:
2. The Mayans:
3. The Incas:
4. The Conquistadors:
5. Mesoamerican Religion:
6. If any time remains click on the photo to the left

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​This unit is designed to examine the origin, rise, and fall of the ancient/classical civilizations of Mesopotamia, India, China, Greece and Rome. Students will examine the various cultural...

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Topic : A day in the life of a prehistoric village.
(Then study Harari)

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A CREATIVE TOOL FOR EVERYONE

Young and old, classes, occasional comics readers and serious fans.

The app is intended first and foremost for use by teachers and pupils in primary and secondary school. Co-funded by the Ministry of Education and Youth, and the BnF (French National Library), BDnF was developed in response to a call for innovative projects launched by the Ministry of Education. The BDnF app is the fruit of close collaboration between the BnF's teams and classroom teachers, in order to meet their needs as fully as possible. The project was designed and tested at every stage by a focus group of both primary- and secondary-school teachers who used the app in real classroom conditions and gave us their feedback, making the app uniquely suitable for classroom use.

Above and beyond the classroom, BDnF can be used by anyone, young or old, whole families or individual comics fans, just for fun. There is plenty in it for budding comics creators too, because the creation tools make it easy to compose innovative formats.

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A CREATIVE TOOL FOR EVERYONE Young and old, classes, occasional comics readers and serious fans. The app is intended first and foremost for use by teachers and pupils in primary and secondary school. Co-funded by the Ministry of Education and Youth, and the BnF (French National Library), BDnF was developed in response to a call for innovative projects launched by the Ministry of Education.

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This graphic shows a timeline of when 15 different animals became domesticated, based on archaeological findings.

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Earth's beginnings can be traced back 4.5 billion years, but human evolution only counts for a tiny speck of its history. The Prehistoric Period-or when there was human life before records documented human activity-roughly dates from 2.5 million years ago to 1,200 B.C. It is generally categorized in three archaeological periods: the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age.

From the invention of tools made for hunting to advances in food production and agriculture to early examples of art and religion, this enormous time span-ending roughly 3,200 years ago (dates vary upon region)-was a period of great transformation. Here's a closer look:

The Stone Age

Divided into three periods: Paleolithic (or Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (or Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (or New Stone Age), this era is marked by the use of tools by our early human ancestors (who evolved around 300,000 B.C.) and the eventual transformation from a culture of hunting and gathering to farming and food production. During this era, early humans shared the planet with a number of now-extinct hominin relatives, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.

In the Paleolithic period (roughly 2.5 million years ago to 10,000 B.C.), early humans lived in caves or simple huts or tepees and were hunters and gatherers. They used basic stone and bone tools, as well as crude stone axes, for hunting birds and wild animals. They cooked their prey, including woolly mammoths, deer and bison, using controlled fire. They also fished and collected berries, fruit and nuts.

Ancient humans in the Paleolithic period were also the first to leave behind art. They used combinations of minerals, ochres, burnt bone meal and charcoal mixed into water, blood, animal fats and tree saps to etch humans, animals and signs. They also carved small figurines from stones, clay, bones and antlers.

The end of this period marked the end of the last Ice Age, which resulted in the extinction of many large mammals and rising sea levels and climate change that eventually caused man to migrate.

During the Mesolithic period (about 10,000 B.C. to 8,000 B.C.), humans used small stone tools, now also polished and sometimes crafted with points and attached to antlers, bone or wood to serve as spears and arrows. They often lived nomadically in camps near rivers and other bodies of water. Agriculture was introduced during this time, which led to more permanent settlements in villages.

Finally, during the Neolithic period (roughly 8,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C.), ancient humans switched from hunter/gatherer mode to agriculture and food production. They domesticated animals and cultivated cereal grains. They used polished hand axes, adzes for plowing and tilling the land and started to settle in the plains. Advancements were made not only in tools but also in farming, home construction and art, including pottery, sewing and weaving.

The Bronze Age

During the Bronze Age (about 3,000 B.C. to 1,300 B.C.), metalworking advances were made, as bronze, a copper and tin alloy, was discovered. Now used for weapons and tools, the harder metal replaced its stone predecessors, and helped spark innovations including the ox-drawn plow and the wheel.

This time period also brought advances in architecture and art, including the invention of the potter's wheel, and textiles-clothing consisted of mostly wool items such as skirts, kilts, tunics and cloaks. Home dwellings morphed to so-called roundhouses, consisting of a circular stone wall with a thatched or turf roof, complete with a fireplace or hearth, and more villages and cities began to form.

Organized government, law and warfare, as well as the beginnings of religion, also came into play during the Bronze Age, perhaps most notably relating to the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids during this time. The earliest written accounts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and petroglyphs (rock engravings), are also dated to this era.

The Iron Age

The discovery of ways to heat and forge iron kicked off the Iron Age (roughly 1,300 B.C. to 900 B.C.). At the time, metal was seen as more precious than gold, and wrought iron (which would be replaced by steel with the advent of smelting iron) was easier to manufacture than bronze.

Along with mass production of iron tools and weapons, the age saw even further advances in architecture, with four-room homes, some complete with stables for animals, joining more rudimentary hill forts, as well as royal palaces, temples and other religious structures. Early city planning also took place, with blocks of homes being erected along paved or cobblestone streets and water systems put into place.

Agriculture, art and religion all became more sophisticated, and writing systems and written documentation, including alphabets, began to emerge, ushering in the Early Historical Period.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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The Prehistoric Ages: How Humans Lived Before Written Records

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For 2.5 million years, humans lived on Earth without leaving a written record of their lives-but they left behind other kinds of remains and artifacts.

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See Frankopan pages 57 to 59 make a mindmap

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See Frankopan pages 57 to 59 make a mindmap

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Prehistory (The Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages) BEGINNINGS Ep. 1

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The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow review - have we got our ancestors wrong?

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Show caption
'Prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation': a 4,000-year-old cave drawing. Photograph: Getty Images/iStockphoto

In the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond's and Yuval Noah Harari's , that backwater of history - prehistory - has been infused by a surge of popular interest. It's also proved an area of fertile promise for those who find the established narratives of modernity either constricting or based on false premises or both.

The last point is particularly relevant for the egalitarian-minded. After the catastrophic failure of the Soviet experiment, there were few places left to turn in support of the belief that humanity is at heart cooperative rather than competitive. The notable exception was the pre-agricultural era, those tens of thousands of years in which humans were thought to live in a state of... well, what exactly?

Since the Enlightenment, there have been two conflicting visions of humanity stripped of its civilised trappings. On the one hand, there is Hobbes's notion of us as predisposed to violence - waging war against each other in a "nasty, brutish and short" existence. On the other, Rousseau's idyll of prelapsarian innocence, in which humanity led a life of Edenic bliss before being destroyed by the corruptions of society.

Both these understandings of humanity's roots are manifestly wrong, contend the late anthropologist David Graeber and his co-author, the archaeologist David Wengrow in their new and richly provocative book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. As the title suggests, this is a boldly ambitious work that seems intent to attack received wisdoms and myths on almost every one of its nearly 700 absorbing pages.

Of course, few modern scholars accept either Hobbes's bleak caricature or Rousseau's romantic musings. Nonetheless, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these antithetical conceptions of human nature feed into the consensus that has been popularised by figures such as Diamond and Harari.

That is to say that for most of human history our ancestors lived an egalitarian and leisure-filled life in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Then, as Diamond put it, we made the "worst mistake in human history", which was to increase population numbers through agricultural production. This, so the story goes, led to hierarchies, subordination, wars, disease, famines and just about every other social ill - thus did we plunge from Rousseau's heaven into Hobbes's hell.

According to Graeber and Wengrow's reading of up-to-date archeological and anthropological research, that story, too, is nonsense. Humanity was not restricted to small bands of hunter-gatherers, agriculture did not lead inexorably to hierarchies and conflicts and there was not one mode of social organisation that prevailed, at least until thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture.

On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year.
History books
The author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, Graeber, it's worth bearing in mind, was a committed anarchist who was instrumental in setting up the Occupy Wall Street protest. Another factor that bears consideration is that both archaeology and anthropology are disciplines that are notoriously vulnerable to subjective interpretation.

Such "distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies", the authors caution, but then do not entirely heed their own warning. While readily acknowledging the limitations of verifiable evidence, they nonetheless engage in creative speculation, albeit with a host of covering "most likelys".

The histories they weave are fascinating, bringing to light extraordinary illustrative characters such as Kandiaronk, the brilliant Native American Huron-Wendat chief who confounded French Jesuits with his powerful debating skills.

This imaginative attempt to reconfigure humanity's roots contends that early people were free to shape their own lives

The strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions
Yet there is a distinct sense of cherrypicking, of stringing together examples that fit the broad sweep of their argument, and dismissing the rest. One historian has accused them of making at least one "ballistically false" claim (that captured settlers in America preferred to remain with their native captors).

All the same, the strength of the book is the manner in which it asks us to rethink our assumptions. It isn't, say the authors, that earlier humans were egalitarian, for there were often differences in material wealth. Rather, they enjoyed an equality of social - and therefore political - participation and, moreover, a shared sense of freedom: of movement, to disobey command and to "shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones".

Most significantly, the authors replace the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live. Our distant forebears were not hopeless puppets of historical inevitability but masters of their own trajectory.

Still, the question the authors repeatedly ask, but never quite get round to answering is, how then did we become "stuck" in a system of hierarchies and conspicuous inequalities of power and consumption? Despite inferring and speculating at almost every turn, the two Davids become suddenly circumspect when confronting this central mystery that haunts their book.

They write that "for now the material at our disposal, especially for the early phases of the process, is still too sparse and ambiguous to provide definitive answers". In truth, that proviso could be employed for almost everything under discussion in this book, but then it would not have been nearly as entertaining and thought-provoking.

It is, in the end, an impressively large undertaking that succeeds in making us reconsider not just the remote past but also the too-close-to-see present, as well as the common thread that is our shifting and elusive nature.

* The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

'Attack received wisdoms': David Wengrow, left, and David Graeber. Photograph: Kalpesh Lathigra

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow review - have we got our ancestors wrong?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the wake of bestselling blockbusters such as Jared Diamond's and Yuval Noah Harari's , that backwater of history - prehistory - has been infused by a surge of popular interest. It's also proved an area of fertile promise for those who find the established narratives of modernity either constricting or based on false premises or both.

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Scientists discover the oldest homo sapiens fossils at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco

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Ancient Fossils from Morocco Mess Up Modern Human Origins

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The year was 1961. A barite mining operation at the Jebel Irhoud massif in Morocco, some 100 kilometers west of Marrakech, turned up a fossil human skull. Subsequent excavation uncovered more bones from other individuals, along with animal remains and stone tools. Originally thought to be 40,000-year-old Neandertals, the fossils were later reclassified as Homo sapiens-and eventually redated to roughly 160,000 years ago. Still, the Jebel Irhoud fossils remained something of a mystery because in some respects they looked more primitive than older H. sapiens fossils.

Now new evidence is rewriting the Jebel Irhoud story again. A team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has recovered more human fossils and stone tools, along with compelling evidence that the site is far older than the revised estimate. The researchers described their findings recently in Nature. If the fossils do in fact represent H. sapiens, as the team argues, the finds push back the origin of our species by more than 100,000 years and challenge leading ideas about where and how our lineage evolved. But other scientists disagree over exactly what the new findings mean. Far from tidily solving the puzzle of our origins, the Jebel Irhoud discoveries add to mounting evidence that the dawning of our kind was a very complicated business.

Experts have long agreed that H. sapiens got its start in Africa. Up to this point, the oldest commonly accepted traces of our species were 195,000-year-old remains from the site of Omo Kibish and 160,000-year-old fossils from Herto, both in Ethiopia. Yet DNA evidence and some enigmatic fossils hinted that our species might have deeper roots.

In their recent work, Hublin and his colleagues unearthed fossils of several other individuals from a part of the Jebel Irhoud site that the miners left undisturbed. The team's finds include skull and lower jaw bones, as well as stone tools and the remains of animals the humans hunted. Multiple techniques date the rock layer containing the fossils and artifacts to between 350,000 and 280,000 years ago.

The researchers found that the sizes and shapes of the Jebel Irhoud face, lower jaw and teeth align with those of H. sapiens, not Neandertals or other archaic humans. But the braincase is elongated like that of archaic humans, not rounded like that of their modern counterparts. Such variations are associated with differences in brain organization. The team concluded that the Jebel Irhoud remains represent "the very root of our species, the oldest H. sapiens ever found in Africa or elsewhere," Hublin said at a press conference. The remains reveal a group that lacked some of our hallmark traits but whose anatomical form could have gradually evolved into our modern one, he and his colleagues report in their paper describing the fossils.

Hublin noted that the findings do not imply that Morocco was the cradle of modern humankind. Instead, taken together with other fossil discoveries, they suggest that the emergence of H. sapiens was a pan-African affair. By 300,000 years ago early H. sapiens had spread across the continent. This dispersal was helped by the fact that Africa was quite different back then-the Sahara was green, not the forbidding desert barrier that it is today.

Not all scientists accept the premise that the Jebel Irhoud fossils belong to H. sapiens, however. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison notes that Hublin and his colleagues did not compare the Jebel Irhoud remains with 800,000-year-old fossils found in Spain from a species called Homo antecessor: "Maybe Jebel Irhoud was evolving into modern humans, but another possibility is that it is retaining facial morphology from an H. antecessor -like population that may have been the last common ancestor of Neandertals and later African archaic humans."

The new fossils "raise major questions about what features define our species," observes paleoanthropologist Marta Mirazón Lahr of the University of Cambridge. "[Is] it the globular skull, with its implications [for] brain reorganization, that makes a fossil H. sapiens? If so, the Irhoud population [represents] our close cousins" rather than members of our species. But if, on the other hand, a small face and the shape of the lower jaw are the key traits, then the Jebel Irhoud remains could be from our actual ancestors-and thus shift the focus of scientists who study modern human origins from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean-Mirazón Lahr says.

Either way, the discoveries could fan debate over who invented the artifacts of Africa's Middle Stone Age cultural period, which spanned the time between roughly 300,000 and 40,000 years ago. If H. sapiens was around 300,000 years ago, it could be a contender. But other human species were on the scene back then, too, including Homo heidelbergensis and Homo naledi.

The Jebel Irhoud finds "make the picture nicely complicated," says archaeologist Christian Tryon of Harvard University. But the added wrinkle means that the scientists chasing the origins of our own species have their work cut out for them. Sometimes the most familiar things are also the most mysterious.

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Ancient Fossils from Morocco Mess Up Modern Human Origins

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The year was 1961. A barite mining operation at the Jebel Irhoud massif in Morocco, some 100 kilometers west of Marrakech, turned up a fossil human skull. Subsequent excavation uncovered more bones from other individuals, along with animal remains and stone tools.

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Ötzi the Iceman: What we know 30 years after his discovery

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Thirty years ago this month, Europe's most famous mummy was discovered lying face-down in the ice, on the edge of a lake nearly two miles high in the Ötztal Alps bordering Austria and Italy.

Naturally preserved by more than 5,000 years of sun, wind, and freezing temperatures, the leathery remains of Ötzi the Iceman quickly became a global sensation, the subject of countless books and documentaries and even a feature film reconstructing his life in Neolithic Europe and his violent death.

Today, Ötzi is carefully tended to by researchers at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where his wizened body is kept in a custom cold chamber maintained at a constant temperature of -21.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Four or five times a year, his remains are sprayed with sterile water to create an icy, protective exoskeleton that ensures he stays a " wet mummy " (one naturally preserved in a wet rather than dry environment).

In an average year, about 300,000 visitors travel to Bolzano to marvel at the ancient Iceman through a thick glass window that affords a view into his frosty chamber. Ötzi is equally in demand by scientists, who jump at the rare opportunity to study the incredibly well-preserved remains of a man who lived long before the rise of Europe's earliest cities, and even before Egypt's first pyramid was built.

"Ötzi is, in my eyes, the best investigated human body the whole world has ever seen," says Oliver...

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Ötzi the Iceman: What we know 30 years after his discovery

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Thirty years ago this month, Europe's most famous mummy was discovered lying face-down in the ice, on the edge of a lake nearly two miles high in the Ötztal Alps bordering Austria and Italy.

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By: M. Vidale and L. Bondioli and D.W. Frayer and M. Gallinaro and A. Vanzetti View PDF

The Iceman mummy, nicknamed Ötzi, was discovered in 1991 amidst sheets of melting ice on the Tisenjoch pass of the Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Alps. He was found on the border between Italy and Austria, at an altitude of 3,200 m above sea level. He is a well-preserved male human corpse, dark in color, and dates to the early Copper Age, indicating he is more than 5,000 years old (ca. 3,250 yrs. cal BCE). His belongings, scattered around the body, included a bow and quiver with arrows, a complete copper-bladed axe, a flint dagger with a wicker sheath, two birch wood vessels clad with maple leaves, remnants of a backpack, a leather pouch with small objects, fur and leather garments, shoes, and other minor artifacts. When scientists realized the antiquity of the find, the media response was overwhelming and Ötzi captivated audiences far and wide.

Was Ötzi Attacked?

Both scholars and the general public gravitated to the so-called disaster theory in which Ötzi had climbed the slopes to the Tisenjoch. On the way or on the pass, he was mortally wounded in an armed attack. With an arrow deeply sunk in his left shoulder, he collapsed in solitude on the mountaintop, bleeding to death. His body would have been rapidly dried by a strong, warm wind, and was soon covered by frozen snow. No signs of scavenging activity were visible on the body, and all the equipment was left untouched.

Such a dramatic and even romantic reconstruction was simple to communicate and visualize. In the following years, after Ötzi was eventually put on exhibit at the Bozen Museum in Italy, the mummy became a popular tourist attraction and source of revenue. For these and other reasons, it was hard to question the original reconstruction of events surrounding the Iceman's death. Even after careful excavations in 1992, the complete crime scene findspot was not reconstructed. After 20 years, a detailed topographic map of more than 400 artifacts found at the site and the analysis of their distribution with computer-aided simulations revealed that body and objects had moved downslope with the ice flow, but originally came from a spot measuring about 2 x 1 meters (a little more than 6 feet x 3 feet).

Was Ötzi Buried?

In 2010, a study was published suggesting that the mummy might owe its exceptional preservation to a proper burial and the equipment might not be a mountain survival kit, but rather what was needed for a yet more arduous trip-the voyage to the otherworld. Far from simply a casual killing, Ötzi opened a crucial window on the burial rituals and political strategies of a moment in European prehistory.

These findings paved the way for a comprehensive alternative interpretation. Pollen analysis proves that Ötzi died in early spring, when the mountains were probably still snow-covered; the body was likely left to rest for a few months in a controlled open-air environment, thus desiccating the corpse. When the pass became accessible, Ötzi may have been formally buried on the mountain peak to signal the political control of the tribe over its territory. Dug into snow and ice, the grave contents were partially dispersed by ice flows, until recent climatic fluctuation revealed the grave's contents. This interpretation accounts for many anomalies, such as the unexplained mode of preservation of the body, unfinished arrows, shoes unsuitable for climbing, and the cumbersome equipment he supposedly carried. This new interpretation is informed by "social theory" and is opposed by Ötzi's original research group, which still favors the "disaster theory."

After thousands of samplings and high-tech analytical tests, Ötzi is the most intensively studied mummy in the history of archaeology. Almost universal agreement indicates that the mummy is not an artifact of human action, like Egyptian Dynastic mummies. The incredible preservation of Ötzi's body has been and remains a crucial point since its discovery. The mummy is much better preserved than more recent bodies found in similar glaciers, underscoring its importance. Analysis of skin and underlying tissues revealed that Ötzi underwent rapid desiccation while exposed to circulating air, being encapsulated in ice only at a later time. Aeolian desiccation may be due to natural or intentional processes. Material evidence is compatible with alternative theories: natural desiccation at the findspot ("disaster theory") or a sort of funerary treatment followed by burial at high altitude ("social theory"). Today, at Bozen, the body of Ötzi is visible through the glass of a special freezing chamber. To keep him publicly viewable while minimizing risk of damage and decay is a demanding and costly challenge. In both technical and economical terms, public presentation and conservation are conflicting needs; the present compromise is required due to Ötzi's rarity and extreme popularity.

The Copper Age on the Similaun Glacier

Beyond the details of the mummy's preservation and burial, Ötzi's discovery sheds new and unexpected light on Copper Age societies. Healed injuries, such as a hand dagger wound and the fatal arrow shot, possibly coupled with a blow to the head, suggest regular warfare and imply the use of different weapons. Analysis of the gut pollen content suggests that Ötzi had moved at different altitudes, which fits well with a model of squad-raiding warfare.

Ötzi the Iceman's meals demonstrate a fully agrarian and pastoral lifeway, but one that was still deeply economically and symbolically involved with the wild, probably sacred world of the mountains. Daily village life is suggested by ingested cereals, possible cheese residues, and pottery grains mixed in the food, as well as by goat and cattle skin in the associated garments. However, the last meat he ate came from hunted deer and ibex, wild animals that had contributed to other parts of his dress. He also wore a cap likely made of bearskin.

Ötzi also had the marks of a leader of his time, with prestigious weapons (dagger, axe, bow, and arrows), tools, and an ornament (a marble bead). The stone and copper components of these objects precisely match those found in the contemporary graves of the floodplain, but most striking are the preserved, highly refined garments. The care with which various animal skins of contrasting colors were selected and matched and the elaboration and coordination of the attire point to a complex encoding of role and personal identity. Ötzi's coat and belt match the highly symbolic imagery of the monumental stone stelae that, in the later Alpine Copper Age, feature armed heroic ancestors or deities. In this light, while Ötzi may have been a revered tribal chief, later stelae celebrate impersonal, perhaps sacred, ancestral identities. Growing abstraction of power roles might have been a side-effect of the evolution of increasingly formalized political institutions.

Other Icemen?

Was Ötzi an isolated case? Although no evidence exists for similarly spectacular discoveries, significant artifacts dating to the same period surfaced at similar highaltitude Alpine locations. In some cases, such finds (axes, daggers, arrow heads) are alternatively explained as casual losses by travelers and shepherds, or as parts of buried caches. However, at least one other high-altitude Alpine pass, the Schnidejoch, which has a similar topographic setting and gradual glacial melting, has revealed clothing fragments, a wooden bow, a quiver and arrows, and shoe fragments. This material has been radiocarbon-dated to between the early 3rd millennium and the 2nd millennium BCE. Although no bodies have been recovered, such finds might come from collapsed graves similar to that of Ötzi.

Even Alpine folklore suggests that Copper and Bronze Age bodies and burials could be preserved by ice, only to come slowly to light with the transition to a milder climate. The following legend was recorded in 1862 by the historian Luigi Cibrario on a high Piedmont valley: it happens that the glaciers that stretch between the mountains cover a crowd of sinners, both male and female, to whom the embrace of God is precluded until they have destroyed the huge mass of ice with the needles that they all hold. It is likely that the legend reflects the sighting of one or more high-altitude Bronze Age burials in which the dead, according to the funerary habits of the time, wore long copper pins. Emerging from ice like Ötzi, this could very well match the portrayal of sinners in old, traditional outdoor shrines of the same region, as black-skinned, almost skeletal figures.

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to Francesco Rubat Borel for telling us about the revealing legend of the sinners with needles mentioned at the end of this article.

Massimo Vidale, Ph.D. (University of Padova), Luca Bondioli, Ph.D. (National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography Luigi Pigorini), David W. Frayer, Ph.D. (University of Kansas), Marina Gallinaro, Ph.D. (Università degli Studi di Sassari), and Alessandro Vanzetti, Ph.D. (Sapienza University of Rome) contributed to this study.

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By: M. Vidale and L. Bondioli and D.W. Frayer and M. Gallinaro and A. Vanzetti View PDF The Iceman mummy, nicknamed Ötzi, was discovered in 1991 amidst sheets of melting ice on the Tisenjoch pass of the Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Alps.