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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 62

ICEMAN


The discovery of a frozen 5,300-year-old wanderer -- the world's
most ancient intact human -- stirs passion and controversy and
opens a window on life in the Stone Age

By LEON JAROFF -- With reporting by William Rademaekers/Innsbruck
and Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn


    Women have inquired about the possibility of having his
baby. Scientists the world over plead for a chance to examine
him. Museums compete for bits of his clothing and tools.
Nations and provinces bicker over who has custody rights, while
anthropologists struggle to discern how he lived and what other
ancient secrets he is destined to reveal.

    Through it all, the object of this desire and celebrity
has remained mute, though his very appearance on the scene has
spoken volumes. He is known as the Iceman, a Stone Age wanderer
found one year ago remarkably preserved in the melting Similaun
glacier high in the Alps. His discovery has already upset some
long-held notions about the late Stone Age, chilled relations
between Austria and Italy -- near whose border he was found --
and stimulated tourism and commerce. His age, established by
radiocarbon dating as approximately 5,300 years, makes him by
far the most ancient human being ever found virtually intact.
(Some Egyptian mummies are older, but had their brain and vital
organs removed before interment.)

    "He is a remarkable specimen," says Werner Platzer, an
anatomist at Austria's University of Innsbruck. "Scientists have
never before had an opportunity to examine such an ancient
body." But the Iceman has provided posterity with more than just
his body; he literally died with his boots on. His glacial
grave has yielded pieces of his clothing, weaponry and other
equipment. While most remains of ancient humans are found
surrounded by funerary objects (if anything at all), the Iceman
"was snatched from life completely outfitted with the implements
of everyday existence!" exclaims Markus Egg, the German
archaeologist who is overseeing the delicate process of
restoring the Iceman's belongings. In effect, the find brings
the remote Neolithic period vividly to life, says prehistorian
Lawrence Barfield of England's University of Birmingham. "It is
as though you are walking around a museum looking at pottery and
flint, then turn a corner and find a real person."

    Examining that person and his implements, scientists have
gained new insight into late Stone Age society. They've been
stunned by the sophisticated design of his arrows, which reflect
a basic grasp of ballistics, and by the ingenuity of his
clothing. Even more amazing is the evidence that Neolithic
people had discovered the antibiotic properties of plants. Among
other surprises, the Iceman has shown irrefutably that human
haircuts and tattoos have been in vogue a good deal longer than
anyone suspected. Researchers have also begun to reconstruct the
extraordinary coincidences of weather and geography that led to
the Iceman's death, his long interment and his startling
re-emergence 53 centuries later.

    "I thought at first it was a doll's head," says Helmut
Simon, the German tourist who spotted the Iceman on Sept. 19,
1991, while on an Alpine walking trip with his wife. On closer
inspection, however, they realized that the head and shoulders
protruding from the Similaun glacier were human, and seeing a
hole in back of the skull, suspected foul play. Hurrying to a
hikers' shelter to report their find, they set in motion a
series of blunders that nearly deprived the world of a priceless
treasure.

    Uncertain about who had jurisdiction, Markus Pirpamer,
owner of the shelter, called police on both sides of the border.
The Italian carabinieri, believing the body was that of an
ill-fated climber, showed no interest. Their Austrian
counterparts, who had already pulled eight corpses out of
glaciers that summer, said they would investigate by the next
afternoon. Pirpamer decided the next morning to go see for
himself, and was flabbergasted: "I had seen bodies come out of
the glacier," he recalls, "but this was nothing like them.
Bodies trapped in the glacier are white and waxy and usually
chewed up by the ice. This one was brown and dried out. I could
tell that it was really old."

    Later that day, an Austrian policeman arrived by
helicopter and attempted to free the body with a jackhammer. The
brute-force tool chewed up the Iceman's garments and ripped
through his left hip, exposing the bone. Fortunately, the
officer ran out of compressed air to power the jackhammer before
he could do further damage. His superiors decided to wait until
the following week to resume the recovery; the helicopter, they
explained, was needed for more important things.

    Word of the find spread, and over the weekend about two
dozen curiosity seekers trudged to the site. Some collected
fragments of garments and tools as souvenirs, and one used a
pickax to free the body from the melting ice. Overnight,
however, the temperature dropped. By the time Innsbruck
forensics expert Dr. Rainer Henn arrived to investigate the
death, on Monday, Sept. 23, the body was again locked in ice.
Having neglected to bring tools, Henn and his team resorted to
hacking it out with a borrowed ice pickax and ski pole, largely
destroying the archaeological value of the site.

    The mistreated corpse, clothed from the waist down when
discovered, was now stark naked except for remnants of a boot
dangling from his right foot, and bore the marks of his crude
recovery. He had also been castrated; it turned out that his
penis and most of his scrotum were missing, perhaps accidentally
broken off during his recovery and taken by a visitor. Flown out
by helicopter and transferred to a hearse, the Iceman and his
possessions were transported to Innsbruck. There, one final
indignity awaited the body. It became the centerpiece of a press
conference in the local morgue. While the Iceman and his
tattered belongings lay on a dissecting table under blazing
klieg lights, reporters and other hangers-on joked, smoked and
even touched the body. Not until late afternoon did someone
notice a fungus spreading on the Iceman's skin.

    It was only then, after five days of heavy-handed
mistreatment, that the Iceman was given professional succor.
Arriving at the morgue, Konrad Spindler, head of Innsbruck's
Institute for Prehistory, was stunned, immediately realizing the
significance of the shriveled body. "I thought this was perhaps
what my colleague Howard Carter experienced when he opened the
tomb of Tutankhamen and gazed into the face of the Pharaoh."

    Spindler could see that the body had been naturally
mummified -- quickly de hydrated by icy winds or perhaps by the
foehn, the warm, dry North African wind that sweeps across the
Alps during winter. To prevent further damage, his team bathed
the body in fungicide, wrapped it in a sterilized plastic
sheet, covered it with chipped ice and moved it to a
refrigerated room at the university. There, except for 30-minute
intervals when it is removed for CAT scans and other scientific
tests, the Iceman has been stored ever since at 98% humidity and
-6 degrees C (21.2 degrees F), the glacial temperature he had
grown accustomed to over more than 5,000 years.


    A Seasoned Outdoorsman

    A broad portrait of the Iceman and his times is gradually
emerging from the tests and observations. He was a fit man,
between 25 and 35, about 1.6 m (5 ft. 2 in.) tall -- which was
short even in his day -- and weighed around 50 kg (110 lbs.).
Though his nose had been crushed and his upper lip folded by the
weight of ice, it is clear that he had well-formed facial
features that would not draw stares from contemporary Tyroleans.
Says South Tyrolean archaeologist Hans Not Durfter: "He looks
like one of our well-tanned ancestors."

    An examination of his body revealed no sign of disease and
no wounds beyond those that were inflicted during his
exhu