Page 8 - Exercise 2B

Unit 1 - Past and present

Page 8 - Exercise 2B

The Iceman

In September 1991, two German tourists were on holiday in the Alps.

One day, they were walking along a path, when they saw something in the ice. They stopped and looked. It was part of a body. They thought it was a climber, but they were wrong.

They weren’t looking at the body of a modern climber. This body was over 5,300 years old. They were looking at a man from the Stone Age. Who was he? What was he doing in the mountains? How did he die?

Did he fall or did somebody murder him? Archaeologists from all over the world wanted to study the Iceman. Otzi, as the archaeologists called him, lived between 3350 BC and 3100 BC - over 600 years before the Egyptians built the Pyramids. He came from northern Italy and he was about forty-six years old.

That was old in the Stone Age, because people didn’t live very long then.

He was about 1.6 m tall, had blue eyes and long, dark brown hair. We know that he was a farmer, because scientists found pieces of corn in his clothes. He was probably taking his sheep and goats into the mountains when he died. Otzi changed our ideas about the Stone Age.

Before Otzi, archaeologists thought that copper didn’t arrive in Europe until 2000 BC. However, Otzi was carrying a copper axe 1,300 years earlier. He was also carrying a bow and arrows, a knife and some wooden tools. He was wearing warm clothes, with a waterproof cloak and leather boots. These things show that Stone Age people were very sophisticated.