Fashion for the Palaeolithic diet is dictated by the romanticization of the image of the world without industrial objects, where the ancient man supposedly lived in harmony with nature. And how he ate in reality, recently established a team that studies the famous mummy Otzi. This is a man who lived 5,300 years ago in the Eastern Italian Alps, whose finest remains were found by climbers back in 1991. Now the researchers have reached and stomach Ottsi.
Funny, but true – because of the complicated process of mummification, the internal organs of Otzi shifted and changed, so scientists, roughly speaking, for a quarter of a century did not know where to look. Now we sorted out, carefully analyzed the contents of the stomach and intestines and found out that Otzi simply adored fat. Probably, it was the fat of mountain goats, and it occupied almost half of the stomach of an ancient man.
The reason for this skillful adaptation to the conditions of the cold highlands – Otzi knew perfectly well that as a source of energy, fat is better than meat. Traces of lipids are throughout the intestines, he has been eating fat for many years. In contrast, the meat in the diet of Otzi was strictly two kinds – fresh and dried-dried. That is, he ate the squirrels only when he killed a beast or from a great famine, like an emergency supply. The same is true for wild wheat – Otzi did not eat long-lasting crackers from coarse flour, he chewed the grain.
The biggest mystery was the presence of a poisonous fern in the stomach. According to one of the versions, Ottsi suffered from parasites in the intestines and in this way tried to etch them. In another, the ancient man simply did not understand the danger of the plant and accidentally wrapped his supplies in his leaves. However, scientists have just started to study the microbiology of Otzi’s stomach and hope for new interesting discoveries.
