Paul:"I was looking for ooparts and I ran into your website. You have done a brilliant job collecting and presenting data. Well done."

S8int.com: Thanks!

Paul:"However, I have not been able to find any information regarding the 5000 year old permafrost mummy discovered in the Otzal Alps in 1991 near Hauslabjoch, Italy. It seems you have neglected to present the most solid and well-known piece of archaeological evidence for the flood on your site, or have not given it the attention so many naturalists feel it deserves. Is there a reason for this?"

S8int.com: We're gonna go with:ignorance?

Paul:"Anyway, I've been researching ooparts for awhile and I really think "Otzi" is the single most important archaeological discovery of all time as well as the best corroborating evidence for the worldwide flood legend, except of course for the Turin shroud.

He made a huge splash in the scientific community as soon as they realized it was an ancient man. C-14 tests were conducted at four of the world's most prestigious laboratories and they all came back between c. 3200 and 2800 BC, I think, obviously in perfect alignment with the Biblical flood date.

He was found face-first in a glacier in the ITALIAN ALPS of all places. His cause of death was asphixiation since he was found with water in his lungs, something which you might have trouble finding info on since most athiests overlook that fact. And as we all know, according to their theory of how glaciers are formed there is absolutely no possibility that Otzi would have survived wholly intact the way he did.

His belongings are all survival tools found in about a 10m (?) radius, suggesting he didn't lay them down one by one like the athiests claim as they burdened him. Also of interest, they say he laid his head on his arm and fell asleep before freezing to death but if you look at how his body is contorted its illogical, especially since his left (?) ear is folded over in a most uncomfortable manner. And I almost forgot, his dental decay suggests he was extremely old meaning, from the creationist p.o.v., his teeth rotted disproportionally to the rest of him--extreme longevity"….Paul Miller

Secrets of a Stone Age Rambo

Robin McKie
Sunday May 4, 2003
The Observer

They thought they had found the corpse of an ancient shepherd, but the iceman from 5,300 years ago now turns out to have been a hi-tech warrior.

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When hikers spotted a corpse poking from the Schnalstal glacier in the Austrian-Italian Alps in 1991, they thought they had found the body of a lost climber. Then researchers took a closer look and announced the iceman was an ancient shepherd, a primitive farm worker who had got lost in the mountains and had died of hypothermia.

Do you remember the ice man called Otzi? In 1991 he was found frozen in an Alpine glacier. Originally it was assumed Otzi was about 5,300 years old. Researchers inferred that Otzi had been hiking through this mountainous area, was caught in a snowstorm, and froze to death. But, new evidence says, “Not so!” This following excerpt was found in a 2001 issue of Discover Magazine: Klaus Oeggl, a paleoethnobotanist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, discovered that food extracted from Otzi’s colon included intact pollen grains from the hop hornbeam tree, which flowers in the spring and lives only at low altitudes. Since pollen degrades quickly in air, Otzi must have died in the spring or early summer. In addition, analysis of his skin indicates that the ice man’s body lay in a pool of water for several weeks before it was frozen. The new evidence is forcing researchers to reopen the case of how Otzi’s corpse ended up in the mountains. Some have even speculated that he was dragged up for some sort of Neolithic sacrificial ritual, but Oeggl won’t go that far. “All we can tell is that 12 hours before he died he was in the valley bottom where hop hornbeam grows. He came up to the place of his death within one day.” The answer to the mystery of Otzi is found in two words: “Noah’s Flood.”… God said, Man said.com Otzi the Ice Man Otzi, unlike other accidental mummies, was not sacrificed. He died during his daily routine; he was taking a nap. Although no one is sure why he was so high up in the mountains without food, he has a lot to talk about after his 5200 year long nap. The copper axe he carried made historians to rethink the dates they had estimated for the beginning of the copper age. His ax told them they were off by 1000 years! His tattoos (the oldest known) told about early acupuncture. His small bark box is the earliest fire kit known to exist and his bag of remedy’s contained a wealth of information including mushrooms (full of antibiotics), fungus (for fuel), and moss (for toilet paper). His stomach told about his diet and his tapeworms. He had no cavities, his grass cape was still in good condition and his leather outfit was still in tack. In fact, his remaining boot was still stuffed with grass (beats looking for clean socks). His body has much left to tell us about his life. He now resides in the south Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano Italy….Thinkquest

Yet now, after 12 years of careful research, scientists have discovered the truth about Otzi the Iceman: that he was the Stone Age equivalent of a hi-tech trooper kitted with complex weapons and survival gear.

This is the startling picture revealed by scientists who have completed the full reconstruction of the oldest, best-preserved human body known to science. It shows that Otzi - named after the Otzal Alps, where his body was discovered - carried sophisticated armoury and wore warm, protective clothing that would have rivalled the fleeces and waterproof anoraks worn by mountaineers and soldiers today.

Otzi's equipment included a flint dagger, a longbow of yew, plants with powerful pharmaceutical properties, three layers of clothing made of deer and goat hides, a bearskin hat, a framed backpack, a copper axe, dried fruit and other foods wrapped in moss for protection and a fire-making kit that included flints and ores for making sparks.

In addition, the iceman had tattoo marks on his back that suggest he had undergone acupuncture while food experts concluded that his last meal was made up of goat meat and bread cooked in a charcoal oven.

'Otzi was extremely well equipped, each object fashioned from the material best suited to its purpose,' state the Otzi scientists in the latest issue of Scientific American.

'The items are testament to how intimately his people knew the rocks, fungi, plants and animals in their immediate surroundings.'

Far from being a poor shepherd who had got lost and wandered to a lonely, icy death, Otzi was well-armed and well-protected when he died.

Some scientists believe he may have been murdered - a theory backed by Italian scientists' announcement, in 2001, that they had discovered an arrowhead in Otzi's back, just under his left shoulder. This has still to be verified by other researchers.

His body was originally discovered on a high ridge just inside the Italian border with Austria. Only later did scientists realise he was the oldest and best preserved mummy in the world.

Then a battle began between the two countries over ownership of his 5,300-year-old corpse, a dispute eventually won by Italy after it was decreed that Otzi's resting place lay a few hundred feet inside its side of the border.

Otzi now rests in a special chamber - in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano - in which his body is preserved in air chilled to minus 6C and kept at 99 per cent humidity.

Initial investigations revealed Otzi was about 5ft 2in tall, in his mid-forties, and probably had a beard. Then archaeologists revisited the site of the body's discovery to uncover new evidence while researchers began studying the seeds and plants he was carrying, the contents of his stomach, the state of his skin, nails and hair, the make-up of his weapons and composition of his clothes.

Analyses have forced researchers to overturn most of their initial ideas about Otzi's supposed primitive status, state the Scientific American authors: botanists Professor James Dickson, of Glasgow University and Klaus Oeggl of Innsbruck University, and ecologist Linda Handley of the Scottish Crop Research Institute at Invergowrie, near Dundee.

For example, they reveal that Otzi's longbow was made of yew - 'the best wood for such purpose because of its great tensile strength,' they say. Long bows of yew gave the English army its crucial advantage at Agincourt, a power Otzi and his people had discovered thousands of years earlier.

In addition, Otzi was found to have been carrying two pieces of birch bracket fungus, which is known to contain pharmacologically active compounds. In short, he had his own first-aid kit.

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Then there was his clothing: leggings, loincloth and jacket made of deer and goat hide; a cape made of grass and the bark of the linden tree; a hat of bearskin; shoes insulated with grass, with bearskin soles and goatskin uppers. He was protected against Alpine weather.

Clearly, Stone Age Europeans were sophisticated individuals who exploited local resources and led lives that were far from brutish or short.

It is clear Otzi had been unwell: his fingernail growth patterns suggest he had been very ill three times in the last six months of his life. Austrian scientists have discovered he had become infested with intestinal parasitic worms that would have triggered diarrhoea and dysentery.

Dickson and colleagues have carried out studies of moss species in the region, and conclude - from the samples found in Otzi's backpack- that he probably came from Juval Castle to the South, where archaeologists have found evidence of prehistoric settlements.

The mystery still to be resolved concerns Otzi's identity. He was not a shepherd: as the scientists say, 'no wool was on or around his person, no dead collie by his feet, no crook in his hand'.

He was not a hunter: his bow was unstrung and most of his arrows lacked heads. 'Other early ideas about Otzi are that he was an outlaw, a trader, a shaman or a warrior.

None of these has any solid basis, unless the piece of fungus he was carrying had medicinal or spiritual use for shamans,' they conclude.

How did Ötzi's body survive five millennia in the Alpine ice?

One of the questions which has intrigued scientists is how Ötzi came to be so well preserved for over five thousand years. Thomas Bereuter has studied the chemical processes that take place in bodies after death. When he heard about the Iceman, he was keen to investigate the case. One change at least was obvious...

Bereuter wanted to know if drying out was the only change that had occurred to the Iceman, so he decided to examine the body. He could see that iceman's fingernails and toenails had dropped off.

There was no body hair. And also the outermost layer of the skin, the epidermis, was missing. A purely dried out body should have retained all these parts. So something else had occurred during those five thousand years...

To find out what else had happened to the body, Bereuter obtained a sample of the iceman's tissue and analysed it for its chemical contents. He was looking for any chemical changes that had occurred, in particular to the body fat. What he found was very surprising...

Bereuter had found that the layers of fat under the skin of the corpse had transformed into adipocere, also known as grave wax. Although it's derived from fat, it looks nothing like it...

Adipocere is almost totally resistant to decay, and so the combination of freezing, drying and conversion to adipocere explains why the Iceman's body is so well preserved.

The discovery of adipocere is important for another reason- because it can only form in certain conditions - when a body is in liquid water.

So this evidence supports the theory that Ötzi had not always been frozen in ice, at some point the ice melted.

Dr Bereuter believes that this may have occurred in Roman times, around 100 AD, when climate records show that the area was warmer. At this time, the glacier would have receded leaving Ötzi floating in a pool of melt-water.

The adipocere could have formed in these conditions and would have helped prevent the body decaying in the water.

Source:BBC Science/Horizons

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