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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."
....the OLDEST post!!
Maybe they we burned in with hot rock edges?
A tramp stamp.
they had white-trash 5300 years ago
I wonder if there were any bucky balls or carbon nanotubes in that soot?
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
was the first hardcore Tyrolean... i was wondering where my mean streak came from. Awesome!
Skill is when luck becomes a habit.
Clothing would have obscured most of the designs, which are of crosses and bands of lines. Some are located near acupuncture points.
Some of the tattoos are near acupuncture areas. Not only were our ancestors playing bone flutes 35,000 years ago, but were also doing primitive medicine 5300 years ago. (Note homeopathic)
To me that is just amazing.
.. That he only intended getting three, but there was a language barrier between himself and the tattooist. he would have stopped more marks being made but he later fell asleep during the proceedure
. .
This could just as easily have been an elite university fraternity hazing incident. I think Skull and Bones goes back about 5300 years or so.
it is still called a tramp stamp?
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
What's left of his skin was littered with simple cross and line markings.
... upon closer inspection the scientists determined this to be Chinese writing which says "Forever Protector of Old Ladies". Work to locate the man's Facebook profile and collection of popped collar shirts is continuing.
Now back to you in the studio, Dave.
*No one* has made any jokes about Otzi taking it up the ass...
This is a practice that is probably still going on to these days.
My mum, who is from the Middle East and in her early 70s has had self-applied tattoos made out of soot since she was a teenager.
They're not like the tattoos one would be used to, but are just simple and crude symbols, one of them a cross. I am sure this is a practice still in many countries, especially 3rd world countries.
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.
While I admire artistic tattoos, I probably won't get one for myself. The idea of something on my skin that is forever, but is perhaps not looking good or cool forever repels me.
But when I was a kid, I accidentally tattooed myself, atleast with one dot of ink :-)
It was in arts education in school. We did calligraphy with old fashioned dip pens. I had the habit then to gnaw on all my writing utensils like pencils, pens etc. So I did that with my dip pen too. Something fell on the floor, I bent down to get it and ...ouch... I had the tip of the nib in my thigh. It's still a small greenish dot after 30 years.
I was expecting it to be titled "first post!"...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The nickname of the mummy is Oetzi, because it was found at the upper end of the Oetztal (Oetz valley). I know that many Americans ignore german umlauts and write an o instead of an ö (native speakers use 'oe', if no umlauts are possible), but in this case it's not even an umlaut. The little town which gives the valley its name is called Oetz with an oe, not an ö.
Around the Campfire and no paper available?
The images of the the wrist appeared to look like ligiture marks. Maybe representing that he was a slave or criminal, "bound" at one time in his life.
On a lighter note, maybe the "Barcode" images were for breeding management or inventory control by his owner or captors.
Egyptians marked their slaves with dots and dashes around the wrists (men) and ankles (women) to prove ownership.
I (37) still have a *tattoo* that my aunt gave me when she put cigarette ashes on a cut that I got when I was 6. Thanks a lot :/.
Did he use vi or Emacs?
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