Deja Vu! We’re reviewing Iceman again, but it turns out it’s a totally different movie. This one tells the story of the final days of Ötzi, a neolithic mummy found frozen in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Compared to the fictional stories we’ve reviewed previously, this one has a lot of real-life archaeological data to work with. Do the filmmakers get the facts right? And more importantly, does the true(ish) story translate into an entertaining movie? Listen and find out! (Spoiler alert: Ötzi dies in the end!)
In this episode:
All the dialog is spoken in the Rhaetic language, with no subtitles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhaetic
Ötzi’s remains are kept at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy: https://www.iceman.it/en/the-iceman/
Brad Pitt has an Ötzi Tattoo: https://tattoos.lovetoknow.com/Brad_Pitt_Tattoos
On the misidentification and unreliable context of the new “human teeth” from Fuyan Cave (China): https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102961118
We were wrong! Animal-human nursing is a thing! https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2016/02/25/why-goats-used-to-breastfeed-human-babies/
Archaeological baby bottles: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/baby-bottles-1.5296792
MacGuffins: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MacGuffin
