In 1991, mountain climbers found the complete remains of a man, frozen and perfectly preserved since around 3300 bce, in a glacier in the high Alps along the border between Italy and Austria. The Ice Man, as he is now known, was dressed in a leather cap, vest, and leggings sewn with leather thongs. On his feet he wore calfskin shoes padded with grass for warmth. Over his clothes, he wore a cloak of woven grass. He carried the tools of a hunter: a bow, a quiver fi lled with fl int-tipped arrows, a bag containing fl int knives, scrapers, and burins for punching holes in leather. He even had an axe with a wooden handle and a copper blade, one of the very fi rst metal tools. His equipment was just as sophisticated as that of much more recent hunters who need to survive in cold places, such as the Indians of the Rocky Mountains or the Inuit of the Arctic. His equipment was not only useful, but it was also dangerous, for he died of a wound from an arrowhead lodged in his shoulder. This was the fi rst known case of one human killed by another. As the Ice Man’s equipment shows, humans made all kinds of useful things never seen before: they sewed clothes with bone needles, they wove ropes and nets, they carved fishhooks, and they made spears, spear throwers, and later, bows and arrows. Like their predecessors, they hunted big game and gathered nuts, fruits, and berries. But they also knew how to fi sh and catch shellfi sh and sea mammals. They made strings and ropes out of vegetable fi bers and used them to make fishnets, fishing lines, and necklaces of beads.
Technological Big Bang: Human Revolution on Planet Earth
