The other day in my archeology class we watched a documentary about ötzi the iceman, one of the oldest-ever discovered human mummies. Frozen in the ice of the Italian alps, found in such a perfect condition that his tattoos were still visible. There was something so powerful already about seeing this human being from such a long time ago; tattoos placed around injuries to help heal him, a meal of wild goat and bread in his stomach, ankles and knees suffering arthritis from constant movement.
What hit me was a quote by a paleoartist who had been tasked with sculpting an exact replica of ötzi for museums to use, since the original has to be kept in a frozen lab to avoid thawing him out.
“By the end of this,” he laughed at the camera, clay-stained hands gesturing at the replica on his table, “I think I’ll know his face better than his own mother did.”
That just about sent me into the stratosphere! Just the thought of a stranger—a thousands-of-years-old stranger who died in his mid forties—and he’s more than a corpse. That’s someone’s baby! Could this sculptor really know his face better than his mother? Was she already gone when ötzi died? Or did she stay up late, wondering why he hadn’t come home, wringing her hands by the fire, unaware that her son was at the top of a mountain with an arrowhead buried in his shoulder? Did she know that the last time she saw him would be the last time she could study his face? Did she know that he would be loved by the people who found him, and lovingly immortalized in museums forever?
How amazing is that?
Then of course that sent me down a rabbithole of permafrost discoveries, and I genuinely cried over the discovery of two cave lions discovered only 50 feet apart from each other.
They were about the same size, preserved just as well as each other, as if they had died maybe a week ago. Were they siblings? They looked like they could be.
But no, testing revealed that between the little boy cub and the little girl, you could fit the entire span of human history. Between these cubs, the egyptian empire rose to greatness and faded into obscurity. The wheel was invented and then the bow and then the gun and then vaccines and flight and space travel, and then nothing because tomorrow hasn’t happened yet. But despite all that, they died and froze only 50 feet apart.
Did you know you could fit the entirety of human history between two lion cubs? Did you know you could fit it all into just 50 feet?
How amazing is that?
Now when I think about the permafrost all I can think about is the frozen baby mammoths who get discovered — preserved so well that they are still covered in ginger fur and have flowing blood — and the discovery of baby wolf pups found buried in human settlements, wolves on their way to becoming dogs — and the proto-dog pup named “doggor” by researchers, which means friend — and the fact that discoveries are more often babies because they’re easier to preserve, and oh, the potential they had, and that is someone’s little baby child, and what do you mean they found her with her mother’s milk still in her stomach and it’s just too much to bear!
Sometimes I just have to sit back and marvel at the pure wonder of the interconnected way we live our lives, and the fact that there’s so much love in it still.
How amazing is that?
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