A long time ago, in the final stretch of Prehistory, a man was running – or rather, he was barely making his way. between the snows of the Alps, at more than three thousand meters of altitude, fleeing desperately. It was the year 3300 BC and the fugitive was about five feet four inches tall, weighed about one hundred pounds, and was about forty-six years old. He suffered from arthritis, cavities, Lyme disease and trichinosis. But the greatest danger for him did not come from bacteria and parasites but from various enemies that persecuted him and they had managed to inflict several wounds on him, including three broken ribs.
The fatigue, the cold, the age and the weakening due to the pain of the injuries made him lose ground and he was reached. An arrow that lodged in his left lung it took her life slowly and painfully. He sold it dearly, since there was blood from some previous opponent on the skins he wore and on the blade of his knife. The body of the fugitive was left unburied, but the ice and the cold mountain climate preserved it. for science, which found it in 1991 and named it Ötzi .
Since then, the analyses practiced on Ötzi, both on his body and on the objects he was carrying, have provided interesting and invaluable information on the life of Neolithic men. :he wore a bearskin cap, leather leggings, a goatskin loincloth and coat, and a mantle of vegetable fiber sewn with animal tendons, as well as a bit of moss that he used to plug wounds and weapons (axe, knife, bow). and arrows); his skin was adorned with nearly a hundred tattoos; and stomach contents revealed that he had consumed various types of meat, bran, and fruit. It has even been possible to sequence his genome and discover that his blood group was 0+, that he had brown hair, that he was lactose intolerant and suffered from cardiovascular problems.
But there is one thing we don't know: what his voice was like . At least for now, because a team of Italian scientists is working on making Otzi speak five thousand years later. To do this they must reconstruct his vocal tract, something they hope to achieve thanks to computed tomography images. Rolando Füstos he is a specialist in Otorhinolaryngology at the San Maurizio Hospital, in Padua, who is in charge of directing such an exciting project in collaboration with experts from the Archeology Museum of South Tyrol (Bolzano).
His main problem is the enormous antiquity of the mummy, which is the oldest that is known (much more than those of Egypt, which are a millennium younger) and its condition prevents the use of some methods such as magnetic resonance, making others such as CT difficult due to the anatomical position (Coincidentally, his arm was stiff covering the neck). Still, Füstos is confident that, with the help of the Research Council's National Laboratory, we will be able to hear from Ötzi within a few months.
The objective in the first instance is to accurately reproduce the larynx and the entire vocal apparatus to then synthesize the voice timbre that would come out of his vocal cords and determine what accent to give him, since even within the same city different intonations can be presented. A computer program will be used created ad hoc . Then it will be necessary to think of a language , since we do not know what the language of those primitive inhabitants of the Tyrol was like.
Finally, there are the possible ethical problems that this operation raises and that has already been manifested in those who argue that it is a deceased person who should be treated with respect, allowed to rest in peace and buried. In that regard, dr. Albert Zink , responsible for the preservation of the body in the museum (in a glass urn at seven degrees and one hundred percent humidity), has declared the irony that he is treated respectfully but for the burial it would be unknown what funerary ritual apply to it Non-stop irony. When Ötzi can speak, we should still ask him.