The Ancients - Ötzi the Iceman

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Ötzi, otherwise known as the Iceman, is a renowned glacial mummy uncovered in 1991 in the Tyrolean Alps between Italy and Austria. Found by mountain hikers at 3,200 meters above sea level, his discovery was due to melting ice sheets and marked a significant archaeological breakthrough.In this episode, host Tristan Hughes delves deep into the world of Glacial Archaeology with expert Lars Pilø, Editor of Secrets of the Ice. Together, they discuss the mysteries surrounding Ötzi – from his possessions and his final days 5,000 years ago, to his tattoos and cause of death. Plus, Lars shares the latest in Glacial Archaeology and highlights from his own groundbreaking research.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. In 1991, history's most famous ice mummy melted out of the ice in a gully at the Tissenjoch Pass, 3,200 metres above sea level, in the Alps, close to the Italian-Austrian border. We know him as Ötzi. More than 5,000 years old, Ötzi was discovered alongside a series of artefacts,

including a damaged bow, a copper axe, a hat, loincloth, dagger, walking stick, birch bark container, what may well be an early Bronze Age backpack, and more. His body has been so well preserved that scientists have been able to learn more about the man's diet, his last voyage, and what ultimately happened to him. Was Ötzi a Bronze Age murder victim? Possibly. In this episode we'll be exploring the story of Ötzi the Iceman with glacial archaeologist Lars Pihlø. Lars is one of the leaders behind the amazing Secrets of the Ice Project. They go out on expeditions in Norway to find and document ancient artefacts that have melted out of the ice for the first time in thousands of years because of melting glaciers.

Their finds vary from Iron Age arrows to prehistoric skis, which you can go and see on their social media pages and on their website. So in this episode, we'll be looking at the story of Ötzi and Lars' theory as to when and where he died on this alpine glacier more than 5,000 years ago. But we'll also be exploring Ötzi's importance in developing the extraordinary discipline of glacial archaeology. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Lars. Lars, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

You're more than welcome. This is such an amazing topic. Ötzi, but also glacial archaeology. But the figure of Ötzi, he feels like the Holy Grail of glacial archaeology. Yeah, there's nothing better in glacial archaeology than Ötzi. He's just such an amazing find. And what exactly is glacial archaeology, to get it all started? Well, glacial archaeology is a new sub-discipline in archaeology that's been brought on by climate change. So the ice in the high mountains is melting and it appears that there was a lot more human activity in the high mountains than we had realised because there's many artefacts melting out of the ice.

In the Alps, that's where it was found, in Scandinavia, in North America, in Mongolia, many places. And whereabouts are you doing your glacial archaeological work, Lars? We are working in the interior of southern Norway, in the Inlander County, which has most of the high mountain peaks of Norway. And when you're uncovering, when you are finding these material remains that are being revealed from the ice, how important is it to quickly preserve them as the ice recedes? It's a strange feeling when you find the artefacts because they come out of the ice and some of them look like they were lost yesterday.

They've been frozen in time and many of them don't need much conservation because they have been like in a prehistoric deep freezer. But once they are out of the ice for a longer period, they'll start to really deteriorate fast. The clock starts ticking and it's important to salvage them. But it depends on the material. If it's wood or bark or bone, it can stay out in the open for quite a long time.

But textiles and fur and feathers and stuff like that does not preserve out in the open for quite a long time but textiles and fur and feathers and stuff like that does not preserve well in the open so we need to find those as quickly as we can after they melt out because your work in norway what you're discovering it's a glacial archaeology it still feels quite a young field but an important field now with global warming and everything. As we're discovering more and more artefacts as the ice is receding from glacial archaeology, are we able, therefore, to learn more about this holy grail of glacial archaeology that is Ötzi? Yeah, Ötzi was one of the reasons that I got into glacial archaeology, because I understood what amazing finds you could make. And the story of how he was found, which we'll get to, was also really fascinating.

But as we've started working in this field, I've been in the field for 15 years now, I started having my doubts about how the preservation of Earthsea had happened, how it could have been preserved for 5,300 years, because it just didn't fit the evidence from our sites or from sites in the Alps as well. So that's got me thinking about Ötzi. And so therefore, let's delve into the story behind Ötzi's discovery. So early 1990s, take it away, Lars, what's the story?

The story is that there were two German mountain hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, who went out for a mountain hike on September the 19th in 1991. And so they went to a peak near the Simelauenhütte in southern Tirol. And on the way back, they just went a little different way down and they came to what later was discovered as the fine spot of Ötzi. And they saw the human body.

And of course, they didn't realize how old he was. They thought it was a recent body of an unlucky mountain hiker. And they were quite shocked by it. And Helmut Simon, he had one last picture on his old analog camera. So he took a picture of Ötzi with the upper body protruding out of the ice, and then they left. And they went down to the Similarnhütte, where they were staying for the night, and reported it to the local owner there, Markus Pierpamer, and he then reported it to the Gendarmerie. And at the time, it was not known whether he was actually in Austria or in Italy,

because the find spot was so close to the border. It turned out it was just inside Italy. But then there was bad weather, and people who salvaged mountain bodies from the ice, they were unable to get up there until four days later. And that interludium there was not so helpful for the preservation of Ötzi, because quite a number of people heard about the find, and they went up to look at the mummy and to check out some of the artifacts. There's a famous picture of Reinhold Messner standing with one of his friends, Heinz Kammerlander,

crouching beside the mummy of Ötzi. And Kammerlander, the guy, he's holding a beside the mummy of Ötzi, and Kamalanda guy, he's holding a stick in his hand to support himself, and that stick was actually part of Ötzi's backpack. No way! They have no idea how old it was. But in fact, Messner was the first person who said that he did not believe it was a recent body. He said maybe it's 500 years old. And so how long was it for them to realize that this body was not 500 years old, it was, you know, dating some three to four thousand years old? That was

at the moment the Austrian archaeologist Konrad Spindler, or I should say he's actually a German archaeologist when he was working in Austria, he got to see the mummy and some of the artifacts that had been taken in with him and one of these artifacts was a copper axe and the moment he saw that he realized that this was not a recent body it had to be at least 4,000 years old and when this information

got into the public the story just exploded. And they had a deluge of media inquiries. And it all started from there. And then they tried the same year to excavate the findsport. But it was very late. You say this was already September 19th. So that was already very late.

And by the time they got up there it was even later and they had snow and they just had to give it up so that was sort of the first year of the discovery. I'd like to focus a bit more on that media hype of 1991 Lars because before Ötzi had there been artifacts or ancient remains uncovered from glacial places in the world? But have they not had the same amount of media traction as Ötzi did when he was discovered? I'm sure that for the archaeologists in the Alps, Ötzi was a sort of bolt from the blue. Complete surprise. But in fact, there were some finds from the ice before that, even in the Alps. Clothing

items found in mountain passes in the Alps. And there were a lot of finds in Norway, all going all the way to 1914. But I don't think they were known to the outside world. And there was also a find from British Columbia and Canada. So there were finds, but no human bodies like Ötzi. And also the preservation, of course, was stunning. And that following excavation, you mentioned September 1991, it's a bit too late in the year to do more real serious work in that area where Ötzi was discovered. What happened in the ensuing excavation when the people, when the archaeologists were next able to get up to that area of the Alps and excavate it? Yeah, they went back and excavated in 1992.

And that year there was a lot of snow. And this is typical for glacial archaeology, is that some years you have little snow that they had in 1991 when it was discovered. The next year you have a lot of snow. And so they had to use a lot of energy to get the snow away. And then they had to limit the excavation only to the gully where Ötzi was found. But they did a very thorough job. They water-seed everything.

And they took large amounts of samples. But they did not find many more artifacts that year, except they found his hat, which was lying at the foot of the stone where the mummy was draped over, which was extremely well preserved. It was lying in a sort of dirty ice layer at the bottom of the gully there. But they took a lot of samples and those samples have been very interesting to look at the results from. those samples have been very interesting to look at the results from. I can imagine indeed. Well, let's focus on Ötzi himself before going into the artefacts and then these samples to deduce more about his story. So when they analysed the body of Ötzi, this incredibly well-preserved body for him being more than 4,000 years old, what did these scientists, what did they discover about him? They were able to

find out what his last meal had been, that he had had, if I remember correctly, it was goat meat for his last meal. And they were also able to, from the contents in his gut, to trace his last days of his life with the pollen that was in his gut, how he went from the valley in the south up to the high mountains. So they were using that and they had put tattoos on his body and they were also able to see like old injuries that he had. And if I remember correctly, there were also signs of arthritis and he's extremely well studied. He's extremely well studied indeed. and i know that your focus is on a particular aspect that we're going to get to but it is so interesting isn't it because isn't

that also that later it was discovered that he might also have one of these wounds there's an arrow wound in his body yeah that when he was originally found he they thought that he had frozen to death inside the gully but in 2003 there were new x-rays taken. And in one of those x-rays, you could see that he had an arrow in his left shoulder, which probably was the cause of death. And it was also later discovered that he had a defense wound to his right hand. So he's transformed from a victim of hypothermia to a murder victim. This was, of course, a very interesting twist in the story. Absolutely, the murder victim. That was always so often associated with Ötzi and his story.

Well, let's therefore delve into the artefacts surrounding Ötzi. What are these artefacts? You've mentioned the hat and the copper axe, but let's go into more detail. How many artefacts are we talking about, roughly, that were discovered in Ötzi's assemblage? It depends on how you count them. For instance, he has a quiver, which is filled with arrows, 10 or 12 arrows, most of which are complete.

And he has the hat, which I mentioned earlier. He has the skin cape, and also one made of grass. And he had a backpack. It's reconstructed as a backpack. It's a little bit unclear. And were all of these artefacts found intact or were they broken? To be a glacial archaeological find assemblage, they are relatively well preserved.

There are some birch bark containers. I think there are two birch bark containers and those are not well preserved. There are some birch bark containers, I think there are two birch bark containers, and those are not well preserved, but those were trampled by visitors to the site afterwards. But the quiver and one of the arrows, for instance, those were damaged. And the original idea by Conrad Spindler, who first tried to explain the fine work that they had been damaged because Ötzi had been in a conflict prior to his death, and he had no time, and he had to flee, and he had no time to repair them, and that would also explain why he had an unfinished bow and also unfinished arrows in his quiver. So to Spindler, that all fit nicely together with a story telling that he had to flee, go up into the high mountains to get away from his pursuers, which he obviously didn't.

But what has recent archaeological evidence that you've been doing, you're studying your focus around glacial archaeology, what is this potential link to natural processes that might actually explain why so many of these artefacts were broken when they were discovered? The thing is that normally when you're on glacial archaeological sites, they are a very different ballgame than the regular archaeological sites in the lowlands, in agricultural fields, for instance. There's a lot of natural processes going on, transformative process on the site. The ice may be moving. You may have wind blowing, dispersing it. You have meltwater transporting the finds. You can have animals trampling on the artifacts. Normally,

what happens is that the artifacts, they break up and disperse on glacial archaeological sites. And the damage that we can see on the finds in the Ötzi assemblage are quite typical for glacial archaeological sites. Like, for instance, we have a mountain pass site, which is very similar to the Thyssen-Jörg site, the pass where Ötzi was found. And we have many damaged artifacts up there. We have a Bronze Age ski, which is broken into four parts, which is found with a distance of 250 meters between each of the parts. And the same with a more recent horse and a broken bow, for instance. You have the pieces, but they're broken. And that doesn't mean that they were taken up

into the high mountains in a broken state. That happened after they were lost. And so have we therefore found any artifacts that are really far away from Ötzi's body that seems to add further credence to, as you say, from your work in Norway at that particular place where one ski, one part of the ski is really far away from the other part of the ski that further affirms, you know, that these natural processes were happening around Ötzi? They only excavated the gully because of all the snow. But there was in fact also a part of a birch bark container that was found outside the gully, a little bit further south.

And that's probably, that's a birch bark that's normally very well preserved. That's one of the last things that disappear on our sites when they get out into the open. So you find the good stuff in the gully. That was the same at our Lindbren pass site. And then on the outskirts around it, you will find birch bark, wood, bone, stuff like that. And that's what happens in the Tisnjok as well. The well-preserved stuff is in the gully.

And then there's other stuff outside the gully, which has been more exposed. And only the really durable stuff stuff like the birch bark container will survive. And there is also a 500-year-younger find, an axe shaft or handle, which has been found south of the gully, and that's just lying on the ground there. But the problem is here, is that this maybe sounds a little bit crazy, but the Tisnok, as we understand it after being in contact with the Archaeological Museum of South Tyrol, they have been very focused on the Gali with the finds. And they're monitoring that closely as they shoot, and they're doing a good job there.

But as we understand it, there's never been a proper systematic archaeological survey of the entire pass. So the axe handle was found by a tourist. So who knows what else is out there? There could even be more stuff from the Ötzi find in the terrain there. So therefore, it's 2023, but what is the official story, I guess the traditional story,

that's set at South Tyrol and since 1991. What is the official story of Ötzi then, Lars? Who this figure was and how he met his end then? The original story was that Ötzi was a shepherd and that he had to flee because of a conflict from the valley to the south, went up into the high mountains and froze to death up there in a gully,

which was free of snow because it was the autumn. And then he was covered by winter snow after lying on the surface for maybe about a month or so to freeze dry. And he was covered by snow and ice and then quickly a glacier. So he died just at the time when the climate was getting colder, so it was really lucky circumstances. And then he basically,

the later glacier developed over the area, and he was stuck in the ice as a time capsule for 5,300 years until he melted out in 1991 when there was a very warm summer, which led to also melt out other places in the Alps of more recent bodies, but him especially in 1991. So that was the original story. But that was presented by Conrad Spindler the first time in his book in 1993, Der Mann im Eis, or The Man in the Ice, which is a fantastic book where he tells about his work with Ötzi and all the media he had to deal with. He did a fantastic job mediating the find to the public

and also heading the investigations, which was taken out of the Innsbruck University. and Lars so you focused a lot on this particular aspect of Ötzi's story surrounding when in the year you know thousands of years ago this person perished why do you believe that Ötzi in fact died earlier in the year and not in the autumn? What's the story? The thing is that the reason it was believed that Ötzi died in the fall was they had recovered a slove fruit from the gully, from the bottom of the gully during the excavation.

And they ripened in the fall. And also he had minute remains from threshing of cereals in his clothing as well, which also normally happens in the fall. So that was the reason. But when Conrad Spinter presented his theory in 1993, not all of his colleagues were convinced. So when we started looking at the Ötzi find again for our new paper, we looked at what other scientists had said about this theory. And there's an Austrian botanist called Klaus Oegel. So Klaus Oegel, he started to analyze the pollen in Ötzi's gut. And in his gut, he found the pollen of hornbeam.

his gut. And in his gut, he found the pollen of hornbeam. And this is a tree which normally releases its pollen in March and April. So that does not fit well with August. And later also, one of the birch bark containers contains green leaves from a maple tree. This will normally say that it's early May summer or June maybe. So then there's a problem with the height that the tree is growing in. If the tree is growing at a large high altitude, it will send out the pollen at a later time. So we're thinking that late spring, early summer, based on Öggle's analysis, is when Ötzi died. And this, of course, has a lot of consequences, because one of the reasons they thought he died in the fall was that he was found inside the gully, on the ground, with the artifacts. Of course, it was a bit confusing that the artifacts were not lying all with him,

but they were also distributed around him, like the quiver, which was found seven meters away. That was also confusing. And the thing is that if he dies late spring, early summer, that's also the time where there will be most snow. So if you look at comparable sites where they have snow measurements, you will normally have between two and four meters of snow,

even considering that this is a windswept ridge, sometimes up to six meters of snow. There's just, I don't think you can discuss with Urkel's finds. These are pollen inside Urkel's gut. They must show what they do. That means that there's no way that he could have died down inside the gully in spring, early summer, because it would have been filled with snow. He must have died on the snow. Okay, so therefore, how does his body end up in the gully itself, if we think that actually he

died above the gully because it was all snowed in at the time? This is actually quite typical for glacial archaeological finds is that the artifacts or like the earth find words say is that they are lost or deposited on the snow and then because these are quite these are not large glaciers but they are thin ice sheets or thin layers of snow they will melt away during warm summers this may happen in one go if you have a really warm summer. It can happen in stages. But eventually the artifacts will end up on the ground. And then, of course, they get recovered by snow

because these are very sort of dynamic landscapes. This process with the melting ice and the artifacts gradually getting down and lying on the ground, they would then get recovered by the ice and snow. And then when they eventually melt out again, we have glacial archaeologists or mountain hikers present on the site. They would look like they were originally lying on the snow, on the ground. But of course, that's not what had happened. But of course, when Conrad Spindler was investigating the find,

this was before the birth of glacial archaeology. Or maybe you could say it was a moment of the birth of glacial archaeology. But the processes that happens on the sites and all that stuff was unknown. So how long, if Earthsea dies on top of this snow and then that snow melts, and this is more than 4,000 years ago, how long do you therefore think before his body is covered in ice and ultimately preserved down to the present day? What we know is that he died 5,300 years ago. And we don't know how fast he went into the bottom of the Gali,

but what we know is how long it took before he was permanently buried in ice. And the reason for that is, again, all the nice samples that were taken in the 1992 excavations, because they updated a lot of the organic material found inside it, both the stuff that derives from Ötzi, but also artifacts that are older than Ötzi, up to 2,000 years older than Ötzi,

and also stuff that are younger than Ötzi. And the original theory, as I said earlier, is that he was quickly and permanently buried in ice. Now, if that was the case, there should be no younger material material in the gully. Because it was permanently sealed off like a time capsule, there should be no Juncker material. But that's not the case. So there's quite a number of Juncker material in the gully.

In fact, a continuous series of radiocarbon dates going up to about 1500 years after Ötzi died. So what does that therefore suggest? That for a period of time, maybe Ötzi was still exposed to the outer air? Yeah, he was intermittently exposed. He was probably, I think, looking at the preservation, which is good for grayscale archaeological finds. He was probably most of the time inside the ice, but on occasion, after a very warm summer

or a couple of very warm summers in a series, he was exposed on the surface. And you can actually, if you look at the body and also at the preservation of the artifacts, you can see that the higher they rise from the ground, the worse they are preserved. If you look at Ötzi, he's lying over a rock and the back of the head is the highest point.

And that part is the only part where the skin has peeled off and you can see the cranium there. The further you go down, you get down to his shoes and to the hat. They are very well preserved. So the ice has been melting down and then it's been refilled with ice and snow. But the thing is that it was believed that this was not really possible because things would disappear very quickly once they get out into the open. But after three decades of glacial archaeology following Ötzi, we now know that's not the case. It's not like they melt out one day and they're gone the next.

Luckily, it's not like that. That's what we thought in the beginning. We were really stressed out to get around to all the sites. Of course, they don't get any better from being out in the open. But they can stay out for some time. They deteriorate a bit, but it's not like they're out one day and gone the next. So Ötzi, his body and the artefacts will deteriorate, but they will not disappear. I was going to ask, therefore, do you think that some artefacts may have been more exposed than others, like, as you mentioned, part of Ötzi's body,

so that maybe certain artefacts have deteriorated to such an extent that we haven't been able to find archaeological evidence for them and that those items have basically been lost to time. Yeah, I think that's possible. I think maybe the most likely scenario here is that when Ötzi and his artefacts melted down, they dispersed a bit on the snow, meltwater, wind, whatever. And then most of the artefacts melted down into the gully with Ötzi, but a bit dispersed from him. And then other parts of his artefact could have ended up on

the outside of the gully and have been lost over time. I think, in fact, that's quite likely that has happened. And you mentioned that there was that one artefact found outside the gully. That seems to be the exception for the artefacts discovered, which probably came from Ötzi's assemblage. So we've only found that one artefact so far from outside the gully. Yeah, and that's the only one which is made of birch bark, which is the most durable material.

And quickly on the artefacts a bit longer, because we already mentioned how they were spread out, how they were broken and the natural processes that cause it. Of all of the artefacts, which were the ones that were closest to Ötzi's body after all of these thousands of years? Well, it was his hat. That was the only part, but that was part of his clothing. Most of the other artefacts were at some distance, like the bow or the quiver.

But mostly it was things that were related to his clothing that was very close to his body. But there were also parts of those that had dispersed because this happened also during the excavation that the gully acts like a pool of water and everything that can float will float around in the pool and disperse. So for instance, you had probably some kind of grass cape and that has gone mostly to pieces, but you still have the grass there,

but that's been floating in water and it's all over in all the samples all around the site you also mentioned earlier how there have been so many academic papers on earth scenes we could focus on so many different things but we're focusing on your key area now lars and glacial archaeology earth is important to glacial archaeology because how important is first of all the discoverytzi and then the continuing research over him down to the present day? How important is all of this to the whole development of glacial archaeology that you've seen, that you've witnessed from the front line over the past 15, 25 years or so? Well, Ötzi was the starting gun for glacial archaeology. was the starting gun for glacial archaeology. And he was, as I said earlier, he was like a bolt from the blue,

not only for the archaeological milieu in the Alps, but also for the rest of the world. We had no idea that something like that could be found. But this was in 1991. And then six years later, you got the first large meltdown in the Yukon in Canada. And then later in Alaska, more finds in the Alps and then in Norway as well. We didn't understand the context of Ötzi when he melted out. It was only when he started

melting out a lot of other places that we understood that he was the starting gun and that it was part of a larger story. And the melting in 1991 was not really that closely related to the anthropogenic climate change melting that we're seeing now. That only really started around the year 2000 and onwards. And how unique a find really is Ötzi? Or do you think that, you know, as more glacial archaeology occurs, and as you say say in the current climate with climate change and that distressing fact that the ice caps of these glaciers are melting do you think that we will find more earth seas almost in the future i think what we can conclude is that there's been a has been a lot of research done on earth sea and as said, the original explanation was that he was saved, and the artifacts were saved by a series of serendipitous circumstances.

And that's why there's only one Ötzi, because it was such a strange coincidence, a series of miracles for him to survive. So the thing is that he died just as it was getting colder, which we now know that's not the case. It was not getting colder at the time. And that he died in the gully and was quickly covered, we also know that did not happen. Then that he was in the gully, but he was saved because the glacier was shearing above it, but he was protected and motionless inside the gully.

We also know that's not the case. What was at the Ötzi find spot was what we call cold ice. That's ice that's frozen to the ground and that does not move like glaciers. So all these miraculous circumstances for preserving Ötzi, they are not really needed. Ötzi is a really special find, but he was preserved by normal circumstances on glacial archaeological sites. And I think that's actually very good news because that means that there should be a chance that more mummies will appear. It's not

like I can guarantee that there will be more human mummies, but just last summer when there was a terrible melt in the Alps, two animal mummies appeared from similar circumstances as the Ötzi fight. I'm not aware that the dates are public yet and I don't know them, but they could easily be very old.

So it's not a 100% guarantee that there will be more Ötzi. It's more likely that maybe a 10 or 20% chance instead of zero. Well, Lars, this has been brilliant. I mean, last but not least, I'd like to focus a bit more on your work in Norway.

I mean, you and your team, real adventurers going to these glaciers and uncovering and preserving archaeology recently discovered, well, recently revealed from the receding ice? I mean, what sorts of artifacts do you and your team in Scandinavia, in Norway, do you discover under the ice? Well, we basically find, we can find anything. Depends on the site. Most of our sites are reindeer hunting sites. We have 66 such sites, ice sites, and those places we find arrows. We have over 200 arrow finds now dating back up to 6,000 years, or bows

or other things that are connected to hunting. But we also have transport sites, like in the Alps where the mountain passes. And in a way, those sites are more interesting because on the hunting sites, you basically know what you're going to find, stuff that's related to hunting, while on the mountain passes, you can find basically anything. Just an example of that.

But we found the clothing, we found the Viking Age mitten, we found dead pack horses, we found a 16th century dog that we found with a Age mitten, we found dead pack horses, we found a 16th century dog that we found with a collar and leash, we find shoes, we found remains of sleds. It's fantastic. We have nearly 4,000 finds now. Wow. And also, this is worthy of a podcast in its own right, but I want to kind of leave it on this because it is so fascinating especially for me who loves this sport you found prehistoric skis too yeah the the skis are just great the history of skiing has been has gone cold in the last decades because of the limited

source material so we're just exhausted but now we're starting to get skis melting out of the ice. And our greatest find is actually a ski from the Mount Dikevorden, which is beautifully preserved with a binding still on it. So we can make exact replicas and do iron age skiing, which is a lot of fun. And in fact, we only found one ski first in 2014, but they often appear in pairs for some reason. So somebody put, left them behind and left both of them behind. And we were waiting for the ice to retreat. And then finally in 2021,

we could see on satellite imagery that the ice had retreated and the second ski came out. And that was even better preserved than the 2014 one. So that was just insane. That was just so great. And that ski, in fact, the pair ski is going on exhibition, which opens next month at the local mountain museum in our county. So that's just great.

Well, I have to try and get over for that because that is amazing. There you go, the origins of skiing. We'll have to do that in a future podcast episode, Lars. Lars, this has been fantastic. I mean, are there any last words or last thoughts you'd like to leave us with either about Earth, Sea or glacial archaeology? What I would like to say is that there will be many more finds from the ice in the coming years, because even with the lockdown warming that we have from the emissions, human emissions, the ice in the high mountains around the world

is going to melt away. In the Alps and Norway, it's going to be 90% of the mountain ice will be gone this century. That's just with a locked in warming, even if we cut out all the emissions from today. There will be many more finds, and as the ice melts back, so will the finds, they will get older. So we will melt back in time and we will get older and older finds as it happens. But it's a sort of a mixed blessing, isn't it? I often call glacial archaeology a tiny silver lining to climate change. But we enjoy the finds, but we would rather that it was not melting. Well, there you go.

There was Lars Pihlo talking all things Earth, Sea, the Iceman and glacial archaeology. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Now, last things from me, you know what I'm going to say, but if you have been enjoying The Ancients recently and you want to help us out, well then please leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from. It really helps us as we continue to get to the

next level and to share these amazing stories with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.