Ötzi, the 5,000-something-year-old man found frozen in the Alps, did not have an easy go of it. He was probably murdered, shot from behind with an arrow that missed his vital organs and led to heavy bleeding and a prolonged and painful death. Days before his death, he fought another person in hand-to-hand combat and gashed his right hand. The more scientists have been able to study his body, the more ailments they have unveiled. Ötzi was born without a 12th pair of ribs, and the ones he was born with were broken. He had feasted on the fat of an alpine ibex the day of his murder—a rare win for the iceman—but his intestines teemed with Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which can cause ulcers. In fact, Ötzi had carried this bacteria long enough that he probably had gastritis or an ulcer or two. (And unfortunately one scientist who has tried alpine ibex described the taste of its fat as "horrible.") Ötzi also ate a toxic plant called bracken in an attempt, some scientists suggest, to rid himself of whipworm parasites, which had laid eggs in his colon. His lungs were sooty, blackened by days spent huffing smoke from fires. The list of his ailments goes on and on: He had fleas in his clothing. He was lactose intolerant. He had horizontal grooves on his fingernails that indicate great physical stress. He had gum disease and cavities. He was predisposed to male-pattern baldness, diabetes, and obesity. And to top it all off, he had Lyme disease, too. Sucks to be an iceman!
It is darkly comic, in a way, to read about new research on Ötzi. Each new paper invariably reveals one more wretched malady. Perhaps next year we will learn that Ötzi had pimples or weird-looking knees or just a bad vibe generally. Archaeology can be a blessing and a curse for the people whose bodies persist for examination. You live on for centuries past your actual lifetime, offering valuable scientific insight into the history of our species. And also scientists get to spend thousands of dollars figuring out everything that was wrong with you and publishing it online forever.
Anyway, science recently dealt a fresh new blow to Ötzi's fragile self-image in the form of a preprint published on bioRxiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. (Outside researchers interviewed by Science and LiveScience found the paper convincing.) Apparently the iceman had the human papillomavirus. And Ötzi didn't have just any HPV, he had HPV-16, a high-risk strain that is responsible for most HPV-related cancers.
Although Ötzi is the first person on record with Lyme, he is not the first person on record with HPV. That honor, the preprint reveals, goes to the fossil known as Ust-Ishim, a man who lived 45,000 years ago and whose leg bone was recovered from a riverbank in Siberia in 2008. So Ötzi is simply one man in a long lineage of people with HPV. This finding could contradict a popular hypothesis that Neanderthals transmitted cancer-causing HPV-16 to Homo sapiens through interbreeding.
At first glance, Ötzi's fresh diagnosis of perhaps the worst strain of HPV known to ancient and modern man may seem to extend the iceman's laundry list of woe. But this elides a crucial detail about HPV that distinguishes the ailment from all of Ötzi's other disorders: You get HPV from fucking.
It's true that you don't need to have sex to contract HPV. Some strains can spread simply through skin-to-skin or from shared surfaces like pools or public showers. But you know what Ötzi did not have access to in his day? Pools and public showers. Of course there may have been some ancient third space for icemen to gather, be merry, and press against each other in a non-sexual manner, or perhaps pass around a communal loincloth. But the most parsimonious explanation here is that HPV is most commonly spread through vaginal or anal sex, so we can only logically conclude that Ötzi probably caught HPV from fucking.
Frankly, this is huge news for an iceman described as "bald and fat" in the headlines just three years ago. By all accounts, Ötzi had a tough, unsparing life in the chilly alps. Researchers always wondered why the iceman was not just murdered, but apparently pursued by an attacker for days. Why did the murderer not steal any of Ötzi's possessions of value, such as his fine copper axe? Did he follow the iceman up the mountain and shoot him while he was unaware? Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police Department, who was somewhat bafflingly asked to weigh in on Ötzi's murder by the director of the museum where the iceman is housed, speculated that the murder was inspired by a strong personal emotion. "If there was hate, if it was jealousy, if it was revenge, we will not be able to tell you," Horn told the BBC.
Let me ask you this. What is the most classic, perhaps even most ancient reason for murder? Consider the emotions hate, jealousy, and revenge. Did Ötzi, despite his parasites and cavities and broken bones and disgusting taste in meals, steal someone's icewoman or iceman? Did another iceman or icewoman go Barry Lyndon on his ass? A petty thief or random killer would surely have stolen such a fine copper axe. A jealous or jilted lover, on the other hand? I am no inspector and pledge allegiance to no police department. But I am not a fool. I can see the facts before me, and I can draw my own conclusions. If it is true that Ötzi fucked, it may also be true that Ötzi was the world's first fuckboy. When will a preprint be brave enough to investigate that!
