Ö-Ö-Ötzi Goodbye

At the weekend Radio 4 Extra Radiolab dealt with Ötzi.

In September 1991 a corpse was unearthed (unsnowed, perhaps?) near the border between Austria and Italy. The nearness to  the border wasn't a matter of great import at first: it was just a question of whose authorities would handle the red tape – checking missing persons lists, informing relatives...

There were some living relatives as it happens:

Living links to the Iceman have now been revealed by a new DNA study. Gene researchers looking at unusual markers on the Iceman's male sex chromosome report that they have uncovered at least 19 genetic relatives of Ötzi in Austria's Tyrol region.

The match was made from samples of 3,700 anonymous blood donors in a study led by Walther Parson at Innsbruck Medical University. Sharing a rare mutation known as G-L91, "the Iceman and those 19 share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," Parson said. 

Source

When it was found that the corpse was a mummy of a man who lived and breathed (and suffered and feared and bled) 5,300 years ago the nearness to the border took on a heightened importance. The fact that the mummy is now in a custom-built museum in Bolzano indicates that the Italian claims won (by a few metres).

The mummy, as shown in Wikipedia.
(See note)

Ötzi ...also called the Iceman, the Similaun Man (Italian: Mummia del Similaun), the Man from Hauslabjoch, the Tyrolean Iceman, and the Hauslabjoch mummy, is the well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE*.The mummy was found ...on the border between Austria and Italy. He is Europe's oldest known natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans. His body and belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy.

*HD note: The numbers differ between reports ("...may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago" versus "lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE") because  Ötzi's remains have been the object of nearly 30 years of speculation and study during which there has been much speculation punctuated by actual finds.  

Note on the image: the Radiolab programme says his right arm is raised, suggesting that the jpeg is displayed back-to-front. 

Source

Ötzi was in his mid-forties at the time of his death – making him relatively old, for his day (long before the founding of the NHS, or indeed  the founding of the Roman Empire, or the building of the pyramids). He had had what some would call a good innings, although that "good" is questionable given the signs of wear and tear:

The 40-something's list of complaints include worn joints, hardened arteries, gallstones, and a nasty growth on his little toe (perhaps caused by frostbite).  

Furthermore, the Iceman's gut contained the eggs of parasitic worms, he likely had Lyme disease, and he had alarming levels of arsenic in his system (probably due to working with metal ores and copper extraction). Ötzi was also in need of a dentist—an in-depth dental examination found evidence of advanced gum disease and tooth decay... 

Despite all this, and a fresh arrow wound to his shoulder, it was a sudden blow to the head that proved fatal to Ötzi. 

Source

But it was the contents of  Ötzi's gut that are of particular interest; and findings based on his gut contents are relatively recent as at first his stomach seemed to be missing; but they were found in 2010. And the intestinal tract is 'like a map and  a diary' – to quote one expert interviewed for the programme. The contents of his innards show that he was high in the mountains drinking water containing fir pollen, then down in the valley drinking water containing traces of hornbeam pollen, and then back up drinking water containing traces of fir pollen.

And before his final killing (brought down by the arrow and then dispatched with blows of a rock to the  head) he had cooked and eaten a feast  – 1½ pounds of cooked goat meat (a heavy meal by any standards, and so heavy that it  made flight impossible). Which one of the presenters said, showed that 'he felt safe enough' to build a fire, cook his meal and eat it.

In my view there's another explanation. Maybe, foreshadowing Marcus Aurelius, and even the Stoics who inspired Marcus by several thousand years, he had accepted his fate:

Soon you'll be ashes or bones. A mere name at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, trivial. 

Meditations

He  was tired of running. Let his pursuers see the smoke of the fire. He was bleeding and tired. His village in the valley had been overrun (and maybe his family had  been killed or worse), and there was nothing he could do about it. But he was going out with a full stomach: Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore.

In Passing

I ordered these the other day:

When I searched for them I used the search string pink tepe.  But I held the e key down for a millisecond too long, and got this helpful alternative:

Be careful what you wish for, especially when AI's involved. (And I bet Ötzi's  teepee wasn't pink.)

But I must be getting on (which I am of course, but you know what I mean: both getting on and getting on).

b

Update 2019.03.14.09.05 – Added PS.

My note on the mixed reports was correct in general but unnecessary in this case, as the speaker was referring to a shared ancestor  " who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago" which of course isn't incompatible with the "5,300" claim; silly mistake, reminiscent of the Darwinian  "descended from apes" mistake.

Beware the Kalends of March

It beats me how those early Romans ever got round to writing letters.

<autobiographical_note>

I remember a Latin lesson given in 1965. Very confused, those ancient Romans. Even some years before the beginning of Anno Domini – about 4 years after the birth of Christ, I think (current scholarship seems to put it somewhere between 7 and 4 BC) – they had to start their letters with the abbreviation a.d.

Father Aloysius explained to us the dating system used by the ancient Romans, based on a number of key dates in each month (the Kalends, the Nones and the Ides). Before starting your letter, you had to work out when the next such date was due, and count back from it: hence a.d. – ante diem. It must have been a great relief when your letter-writing coincided with one of these key dates; there was no need for the counting back. 

But not much of a relief; the Nones and the Ides jumped around – maybe the Kalends* too; this isn't something I've researched that closely. Luckily for me in that lesson, I was sitting next to a new boy, who had joined us from a prep school (fee-paying, non-state). He had done some Latin before, including this date malarkey. So he knew this mnemonic:  

</autobiographical_note>

So when they sat down to write a letter they had to spend the first half an hour fiddling about with dates and counting. I don't know if they had almanacs back then, but if they had it would have made life a lot easier.

Another memory – at a previous school, named after a Pope Gregory, but not the one associated with calendars – exposed me to the idea of Name Days. The Polish children (of whom there were many at that school in Ealing) celebrated their Name Day rather than their birthday. For most of them this was quite straightforward, but not for those born at the end of February. The feast of St Matthew,  for example, had to change from its more common date of 24 February to the 25th in a leap year. In a leap year, the 24th is an intercalary day; it doesn't exist as far as Name Days are concerned.

This was discussed by John Chambers, former Head of the Time Service at the National Physical Laboratory, speaking on PM on 24 February (from about 47'30" – and get it while it's hot, it'll only be on iPlayer until the twenty-somethingth of March [24th?, 23rd?, 25th? – search me]).  His wife is Finnish, and it was a Finnish almanac that alerted him to the issue.

I think I remember first learning what the French for Leap Year was – une année BISSEXTILE. I knew enough Latin to know that six came into it somewhere but what about the bi? And what did six or two have to do with Leap Years anyway?

I should have noticed the double s, which occurs also in the rarely-used scholarly English word BISSEXTILE.

<digression>
When French audiences want to see an encore, they don't say Encore. What they say is bis.
</digression>

The prefix was not bi- but bis-.

The bis- prefix crops up in Spanish too. A great-grandfather – a grandfather being un abuelo – is un bisabuelo. So in a bissextile year, something happens twice . But what? Presumably something to do with six? And here's the answer: the thing that happens twice is 24 February (with the alias "25 February"):

The ante diem date
courtesy of Fr Z's blog.

Thankfully, this all changed at the end of the Millennium (whenever that was – 2000, probably; no idea what all those fireworks were for on 31 Dec. 1999). The Finnish almanac in 1996 marked 25 February as the feast of St Thomas. But thanks to Mr Chambers (who suggested to the Finnish authorities that the extra day in a Leap Year should be recognized as 29 February, in accordance with the popular belief that that is obviously when the extra day is), in 2000, also a leap year (thanks to Gregory VII's divisible by 400 rule), the feast of St Matthew was 24 February.

Happy 29th.

b

Update 2016.03.01.11:45 – Added footnote:

* Incidentally, the similarity between Kalends, Latin calendae, and English calendar is – of course – no coincidence. But it is a pleasing (to me, at least) irony that the source of the word calendar reflects that variability/uncertainty.

Every month, the priests would observe the moon and formally proclaim when the new month started. Etymonline says this:

calendar (n.)  c. 1200, "system of division of the year;" mid-14c. as "table showing divisions of the year;" from Old French calendier "list, register," from Latin calendarium "account book," from calendae/kalendae "calends" the first day of the Roman month -- when debts fell due and accounts were reckoned.

This is from calare "to announce solemnly, call out," as the priests did in proclaiming the new moon that marked the calends, from PIE root kele- (2) "to call, shout" (see claim (v.)). In Rome, new moons were not calculated mathematically but rather observed by the priests from the Capitol; when they saw it, they would "declare" the number of days till the nones (five or seven, depending on the month). The word was taken by the early Church for its register list of saints and their feast days...

The link to claim is worth following up as well. 

<extra-credit>

For extra credit, the most punctilious of students will also investigate the association of month with moon. As Etymonline again says:

month (n.)  Old English monað, from Proto Germanic *menoth- ... related to *menon- "moon" (see moon (n.); the month was calculated from lunar phases)...  

</extra-credit>

As usual, it's all related: calendar ⇨ solemn announcement of lunar observation ⇨ month; and when you start pulling on one thread, the whole thing unravels [if you have the time].)

b