McConnell 1

Maggie McConnell
Ms. Dockus
1st Hour American Literature
8 January 2016
Response to Icemans Gut Holds Clues to Humans Spread into Europe
Despite the flashy appeal of the title, Icemans Gut Holds Clues to Humans Spread into
Europe by Michael Greshko is informative in a more scientific sense of the word than I would
have thought. The discoveries made by scientists studying the corpse of a 5,300-year-old ice
mummy are providing the scientific community with the the story of a brown-eyed, lactoseintolerant man who lived in a farming community most closely related to modern Sardinians.
Said story leads to significant clues regarding the lives and behavior of humans that lived before
the modern era. From various tests and autopsies, scientists are making speculations about the
age, cause of death, and last meal eaten by the cadaver. They have even found traces of proteins
produced in response to inflammation, suggesting that he may have died with a wicked stomach
ache. What surprised me most, though, was by analyzing this data, researchers have been able
to track the migrations of humans thousands of years ago.
The twenty-first century has brought us knowledge not only of the current condition of
our species, but increasingly more of our species origins and journey to its modern state.
Discoveries such as the Ice Man are examples of this. In order to extract the data they needed,
[scientists] [had] [to] carefully isolate... DNA from a fingernails worth of the Icemans stomach
. Without the advances in the medical and biological fields, such as those in DNA and chemical
analysis, scientists would never be able to make use of their findings. In other words, the
unearthing of the Ice Man would not have the relevance to human migratory patterns that it does

McConnell 2
without the discoveries of present-day science. Discovery lies, then, not only in the finding of
the ice mummy, but also in the technology that is letting researchers pursue its meaning.
As we learn more and more about the Earth and how we once inhabited it, we can also
come to appreciate our discoveries in the modern world that permit us to asses these findings. I
was truly amazed to learn that scientists can piece together past human migrations from the
attributes of a single frozen body, but perhaps the greatest discoveries are not the ones that come
to us unannounced, but the ones that are developed overtime to prepare and help us further
understand new information when it arrives.