On Wed, 7 Aug 2002 06:55:51 -0500, Paleogal <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>This sounds like one sick and aching guy.  Herbs, acupuncture, violence. He
>should have stayed with meat....  Oliva

Well, some of his medicine tattoos were on the knees, supposedly to fight a
pain or other problem he might have had there.
You could also suppose that this problem could have been caused by his
overwhelming grain based diet. Ray with his rheumatiod athritis would
certainly do that and call it autoimune.
This may be correct.

However the times were hard, he manageded to climb to high mountains, along
with very limited equipment, mostly self-made. I mean *everything* he could
do himself. Clothing, arrows, bow, knife, fire, fire transport....
Beeing in the cold and heavy loads can also cause knee problems.

You suggest meat. With meat only it would have been impossible to survive
for him. The capricorns and deers of a given area would last only for days
or for a limited group of hunters. But he came from a *village*. The only
way to nourish a village is agriculture with domesticated plants and
animals.

Hunters don't have villages, they are nomads.
There are *very* few exceptions to this.
A few mesolithic villages near fruitfull coast-lines and paleolithic wild-
grain-collecting villages in the near east (at 29000bc, ref "Guns Germs and
Steel").
The space you can have as hunting area, within a day from a fixed house, is
much too small to survive permanentely over the year. Even for a small
group.

An violence, yes. The arrowhead in the shoulder suggests that he or his
village has been raided by a band of other humans
(maybe he could escape, but that is one speculation among a lot others).

I think the raider people cannot have been from a neighbor village.
Neighbor villages need to help each other (e.g. in case of hail).

Whoever else is raiding villages? Hungry bandits?
How do you thing eatink meat could have improved that?
Is hunting particularly peaceful?
How far is the step between shooting a deer and shooting at a
stranger human? It happened to our ice man.

Cheers,

Amadeus