ICEMAN DISCOVERED IN 1991 REVEALS HISTORY OF PRIMITIVE GRAIN KNOWN TODAY AS WHEAT……

Approximately ten thousand years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, humans returned to the Alps. The temperatures had risen and the rocky, barren land had been slowly reclaimed from the glaciers by vegetation.

While on vacation in an unusually warm summer day Helmut and Erika Simon discovered the famous Ice Man of the Bronze Age mummified remains. Was his death due to gluten from a grain? NO. Dr Klaus Oeggl, a botanist from the University of Innsbruck states the ICEMAN who was discovered in 1991 in the Italian Alps did not die with a full stomach. His last meal was approximately eight hours before his death. The man died 5,300 years ago of hypothermia, murder or a combination of both.

The Ice Man was crossing the Hauslabjoch pass, which cuts over the main Alpine ridge dividing Austria from Italy at 10,500 feet above sea level. Many reasons explain what prompted the iceman to leave an ecological hospitable valley with no water or food except a single sloe berry, which was found with his remains. He also was in possession of an ax with characteristics of the Bronze Age.

Archaeologists divided western prehistory into several periods, based loosely on the development of technologies. Several years after the discovery of the ICEMAN the scientists finally cut a hole into the mummy, insert an endoscope, and sniped out about .004 ounces from the colon. Dr Werner Platzer, the University of Innsbruck anatomist then in charge of research on the corpse, gave .0016 ounces milligrams of the material to Oeggl, who had already been studying the rich botanical finds from the site.

The Microscopic exam of the sample contents of the ICEMAN revealed flake-like, semi-digested material that made up the bulk of the sample as einkorn, the most important wheat of the Neolithic, period of prehistory in which people lived in semi- permanent settlements and survived by agriculture and keeping animals. The discovery of einkorn, which does not occur naturally in Europe, in the ICEMANS intestinal tract suggested that he had contact with an agricultural community. The dominance of bran in the sample led Oeggl to believe that the wheat had been finely ground into meal and made into bread, rather than eaten as a porridge, where the grains would have been eaten whole and found in larger pieces in the colon. But the bread would have been little like modern breads. In order to get bread to rise when yeast is added, the wheat grains must contain a high level of gluten, which lends the dough a durable elasticity and therefore holds the pockets of air. Einkorn has low levels of gluten, so the bread made with it was probably flat hard, somewhat like a cracker, and rather tough on the teeth.

Using an electron microscope Oeggl also spotted tiny particles of charcoal attached to the bran, probably remnants of the baking process on a hot rock, or next to a fire. In addition to the einkorn, the cells of at least one other plant, possibly some herbs, were present in the sample, and Oeggl concluded that they, too, had been part of his meal. He also found a tiny muscle fiber and a burned bit of bone, evidence that the ICEMAN might also have eaten meat. What kind of meat Oeggl cannot yet say, nor can he determine how much of the meal the sample represented. Oeggl also found the eggs of the human whipworm.

Many people alive today who do not live in areas with flush toilets also carry the worm. Oeggl also saw under the electron microscope pollen. Oeggl believed that the quantity in the colon was too small to represent a meal. Instead, the pollen accidentally ended up in the man’s stomach. Until the discovery of the pollen inside the corpse, no scientist had any convincing documentation for his last day. But the pollen provided a snapshot of the environment the Iceman was exposed to in the hours before his death. The majority of the pollen came from the hop hornbeam tree, which grows in a warm environment. Oeggl knew then which side of the mountain the Iceman had been on shortly before his death, but also the season in which he died. The hop hornbeam tree blooms between March and June, and because the sperm inside the pollen grain, which normally decays after a short exposure to air or water was still intact, Oeggl believed it had to have been absorbed relatively soon after its release from the tree. The nearest stands of that tree could have grown to the south of the Hauslabjoch, at least five or six hours away by foot. The high valleys to the north are just to cold to sustain the hop hornbeam tree.

This leads to the possible trade with traveling tribes into the European area and or their own natural progression into farming. Anthropologists question why some humans turned to farming while others continued as hunter gathers. The need for a constant supply of food helped human populations survive. The wild game and gathering were subjected to many variables, which the persistent hunter gathers had not developed technologies to deal with. The close proximity to water, fertile lands with grasses started genetic engineering of grasses and the domestication of animals and thus the dawn of farming.