‘Iceman’ Studied at Glacial Pace, Critics Charge : Science: Some say the international team of scientists has mismanaged what little research has been done on the Stone Age body--a charge that project leaders deny.
Heralded as a window on the late Stone Age in Europe when it was found in an Alpine glacier two years ago, the 5,200-year-old mummified corpse called “Iceman” has become the focus of a controversy over its scientific handlers, the legitimacy of their research, and the potentially lucrative commercial potential of their work and findings.
Two British journalists argue in today’s issue of the journal Nature that the international team of scientists studying the nearly intact Iceman lacks the money to conduct proper research and has mismanaged what little work has been done--a charge that project scientists deny.
In a commentary as unusual for its archness as for its non-scientist authors, free-lance writer Paul G. Bahn and BBC-TV producer Katharine Everett assert that professional and international rivalries are impeding the pace of research and encouraging groundless speculation.
They also allege that the University of Innsbruck, the Austrian college where the Iceman is being studied, is failing to properly exploit the Iceman’s potentially huge commercial appeal. Although project scientists are working on a book, which they said is one reason they have withheld some information, they have not pursued other options--including, the writer and BBC producer noted, an exclusive contract for a TV documentary.
“Eighteen months after the discovery, the amount of published information on the body and its associated finds is still pitifully small,” the critics wrote. “Research opportunities have already been missed, and the delay in providing convincing answers to the many troubling aspects of the case has allowed bizarre rumors and whispers of fakery to circulate, bringing archeology in general, and this find in particular, into disrepute.”
Mary McSweeney, a spokeswoman for the University of Innsbruck, acknowledged some difficulty in raising the $10 million that researchers estimate they will need to properly examine the Iceman and learn his secrets. But the chairman of the university’s anatomy department, Werner Bladzar, said funding is adequate for current research.
Bladzar dismissed Bahn and Everett as ignorant amateurs and suggested that their criticism was motivated by the fact that researchers are withholding information on the Iceman from the BBC and other media. Scientists want the data published first in scientific journals and in the book scheduled to come out this fall.
Although anthropologist Chris Stringer of the Museum of Natural History in London concurred that noticeably little scientific information about the Iceman has been published so far, his colleagues in the United States are perplexed by the criticism. They noted that Iceman project scientists have published in Science, Evolutionary Anthropology and other journals.
Bahn and Everett repeat familiar complaints about the haphazard way in which the Iceman was hacked free of the ice and allowed to partially defrost, errors that separated the body from its clothing and other artifacts, killed any hope of analyzing gases in the surrounding ice and let fungus develop on the corpse.
They also ask how a body could remain for 5,200 years in a glacier without being crushed or swept to the base of the mountain and disgorged, fates routinely met by the bodies of fallen mountain climbers. The standard theory--that the Iceman was caught in a shallow depression, essentially a glacial eddy--is “little short of miraculous,” they wrote.
“The body’s condition is equally astounding,” they added, questioning how the corpse came to be mummified--dehydrated--while suspended in ice.
Bladzar said the consensus is that Iceman was caught in a thunderstorm, which local residents call a foehn . Its winds were warm enough to dehydrate the corpse. After perhaps a week, Bladzar said, snow began to fall and Iceman soon was encased in the glacier.
Bahn and Everett skeptically assert that this explanation “seems unlikely” because “the foehn blows at much lower altitudes than the height (10,500 feet) at which the body was found.”
BACKGROUND
A German couple hiking a well-traveled path in the Alps found a mummified corpse half-uncovered in the Similaun glacier in September, 1991. The region, at 10,500 feet, has been glaciated for at least 200 years and only recently was exposed because Alpine glaciers are shrinking. The body, popularly known as “Iceman,” was discovered on the Italian side of the border, but Italy has agreed to let it stay at an Innsbruck, Austria, medical school, where an international team of scientists is analyzing it. Radiocarbon dating estimates Iceman lived around 3200 BC, during the late Neolithic period. He was between 25 and 35 years old when he died.
