Nicholas St. Fleur What was the Iceman wearing?
Oetzi the Iceman was a dapper dresser. About 5,300 years ago, he sported a fur hat made from a brown bear, a sheepskin loincloth, leggings and a coat made of goat hide, shoelaces from wild cows, and a quiver made from deer leather.
Researchers from the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Research Academy in Bolzano, Italy, used genetic testing to identify the animals that made up the frozen mummy’s fur and leather ensemble. Their findings were published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
Oetzi, as he became known, was found face down in a thawing glacier in the Oetztal Alps, which border Austria and Italy, nearly 25 years ago. Since then, researchers have learned a lot about his life from studying his caramel-colored corpse. The Iceman had an arrow in his shoulder, parasites in his gut, wild goat meat in his stomach and tattoos all over his body. Now his wardrobe is giving scientists information about how the Copper Age man dressed. EARLY CARVING KNIVES
Early human history was written with stone tools.
James Pokines, a forensic anthropologist at the Boston University School of Medicine, and his colleagues uncovered several 250,000-year-old blades and hand axes, with bits of rhinoceros, horse and camel on them, in Jordan.
“We know they were butchering them or processing the carcass,” Pokines said. “But is it proof that they killed all of the species here? Probably not. They could have scavenged them all, but we don’t know.”
The findings, which were published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, may be the oldest evidence of protein residue on stone tools.
Nicholas St. Fleur
DOLPHIN IN A DRAWER
Scientists have determined that a skull that had been sitting in a drawer at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington for more than 60 years belonged to a previously unknown species of extinct dolphin.
The animal, whose skull was found in 1951 in Yakutat, Alaska, has been given the name Arktocara yakataga, which can be loosely translated from the Greek as “the north face from Yakutat.” Its description is in the journal PeerJ.
There is one descendant of Arktocara still extant, the South Asian river dolphin, a freshwater animal that is on the edge of extinction. Arktocara was almost certainly an oceanic creature.
The dolphin’s discoverer, Alexandra Boersma, a researcher at the National Museum, said that judging only from the size of the skull, it was probably about 7 ½ feet long. It had a flexible neck, unlike oceanic dolphins, whose necks are hardly distinguishable from their bodies. She estimates that it lived about 25 million years ago.
“One of the great things about the Smithsonian,” Boersma said, “is that the collections are so vast. We were just walking around to see if anything was interesting. And then, wow!”
Nicholas Bakalar
ONE WAY THAT WHISKEY BEATS COFFEE
A spilled drop of coffee leaves a stain with dark, sharply defined edges. When whiskey dries, it leaves a more uniform, often beautiful film.
Spurred by the curiosity of Ernie Button, a Phoenix photographer, in the films of evaporated whiskey at the bottom of his glass, scientists at Princeton University performed a series of experiments, revealing that the key difference between whiskey and coffee is that whiskey is a mix of two liquids — alcohol and water — while coffee is just water, with brown bits mixed in. As the alcohol in whiskey evaporates, the concentration of water increases, and that creates flows that generate the patterns.
Other molecules are also important: a surfactant, a chemical that reduces the surface tension of droplets, and long, stringlike molecules known as polymers, which attach to the glass, providing a template. The findings are in Physical Review Letters.
Kenneth Chang