World's oldest snowshoe found on a glacier in Italy's Dolomites | Hacker News Reader

World's oldest snowshoe found on a glacier in Italy's Dolomites

telegraph.co.uk

54 pointscurtis8 comments

The discovery was made close to where the frozen, mummified remains of a Neolithic hunter were found by two German hikers 25 years ago.

It's not clear exactly how near the snowshoe site was to Oetzi's site, but a little bit of googling suggests it might have been quite close indeed -- maybe within a couple of miles. Of course the chance that the artifact is directly related to Oetzi is quite slim indeed, since geographical proximity doesn't particularly indicate chronological proximity. Still pretty interesting, though.

>Of course the chance that the artifact is directly related to Oetzi is quite slim indeed, since geographical proximity doesn't particularly indicate chronological proximity.

How about the geographic proximity combined with the remoteness of the location? Is it one of those places that very few people have ever set foot on?

The article says the snowshoes were discovered on Gurgler Eisjoch glacier. There's no entry in Wikipedia (en.wikipedia, anyway) for the glacier, but there is a mention of a "Gurgler Eisjoch" mountain pass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tztal_Alps#Passes). If both Oetzi and the snowshoes were discovered near a pass, then perhaps it's not so surprising after all. Quite a lot of traffic would be funneled through a narrow geographic area, especially when considered over hundreds or thousands of years.

Yes, Oetzi was discovered in a mountain pass, that is why he was found so close to the Austrian-Italian border. Also, analysis of his bones and microscopic quartz crystals in his gut showed that he made the journey between the Italian and Austrian valleys of the region often during his life.

Paywall

A wall easily scaled by clicking "web" under the link, and clicking the first search engine result.

I do feel that there should be some kind of FAQ about that somewhere on HN. Something like "The Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph paywalls can be avoided by Googling the article name or clicking 'web'" would be useful for getting rid of the people commenting about the paywall.

This. I never even realized the web link was there. Always wondered myself why people would keep posting WSJ links to HN without complaints since it was always behind a paywall.

TIL.

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