An off-beat experiment has poked holes in a common assumption about Ötzi the Iceman’s tattoos.
Ötzi is a roughly 5,200-year-old mummy. His body was found in a mountain glacier along the border of Austria and Italy in 1991. That body is decorated with the world’s oldest known tattoos. There are 61 in total, including black lines and crosses on Ötzi’s left wrist, lower legs, lower back and chest.
Scientists had thought that Ötzi got his tattoos by rubbing charcoal ash into slices in his skin. Those cuts would have been made with a sharp stone tool. But until now, that idea had never been tested.
“Our study shows that the past 30 years of [thinking] as to how the Iceman was tattooed is incorrect,” says Aaron Deter-Wolf. He’s an archaeologist at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology. That’s in Nashville.
Deter-Wolf and his colleagues did tattooing experiments. They also reviewed traditional tattooing practices around the world. Their new findings suggest that the common story about how Ötzi got his tattoos is wrong.
Instead, a hand-held, single-pointed tool with pigment on its tip likely punched many tiny holes in Ötzi’s skin. Such closely spaced pricks of ink could have built up the lines of the Iceman’s tattoos.
The researchers shared the findings March 13 in the European Journal of Archaeology.
This “hand-poke” tattooing technique has been used by non-industrial cultures around the world. And that includes Ötzi’s home region of central Europe.
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Tattooing for science
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