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World's Oldest Tattoo Written In Soot
ewenc writes "A series of tattoos belonging to Otzi the 5300 year-old Tyrolean Iceman are made of soot, reports New Scientist. Mountain climbers discovered Otzi's mummified body in the Austrian-Italian alps in 1991. What's left of his skin was littered with simple cross and line markings. Electron microscopy and spectroscopy now show that Otzi's tats are made of double-bonded carbon indicative of soot, as well as silicate crystals that probably came from rocks surrounding a fire pit."
All comments from before 1999/01/01 have been deleted. The first post on 1999/01/01, still in the archive is; Anonymous Coward on Friday January 01 1999, @05:15PM (#2049871) I agree, that really boiled my blood. I saw the new layout this morning, I thought it was pretty damn cool looking.
You can find some high quality images at http://iceman.eurac.edu/. You can see the whole body of Oetzi down to millimetric detail. You can also compare images taken with white light to images taken with a special UV light.
As a little side note: I live only about 30 km from the Oetzi museum where the mummy is kept. But whenever I went by the museum, people were lined up in an incredibly long queue in front of the entrance, so I haven't actually seen "the real thing" yet.