Word: bones
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Later that day, an Austrian policeman arrived by helicopter and attempted to free the body with a jackhammer. The brute-force tool chewed up the Iceman's garments and ripped through his left hip, exposing the bone. Fortunately, the officer ran out of compressed air to power the jackhammer before he could do further damage. His superiors decided to wait until the following week to resume the recovery; the helicopter, they explained, was needed for more important things...
Homo tyrolensis, as some scientists have dubbed him, also had a leather pouch resembling a small version of the "fanny packs" worn by tourists today. Inside he carried a sharpened piece of bone, probably used to make sewing holes in leather, and a flint-stone drill and blade. A sloeberry, probably his snack food, was found at the site, along with two mushrooms strung on a knotted leather cord. The mushrooms have infection-fighting properties and may have been part of the world's oldest-known first-aid kit. The only decorative item, possibly a talisman, was a small, doughnut...
...afterlife, but the homogeneity of the buried objects suggests that social classes had not yet appeared. Like the other principal culture of that region and time, known as the Longshan, the Yangshao kept pigs, sheep, chicken, buffalo and oxen, and used finely crafted tools made from stone, bone and wood...
...skin diseases of every kind: abscesses, cankers, scrofula, tumors, eczema and erysipelas. In a throwback to biblical times, lepers constituted a class of pariahs living on the outskirts of villages and cities. Constant famine, rotten flour and vitamin deficiencies afflicted huge segments of society with blindness, goiter, paralysis and bone malformations that created hunchbacks and cripples. A man was lucky to survive 30, and 50 was a ripe old age. Most women, many of them succumbing to the ravages of childbirth, lived less than 30 years. There was no time for what is now considered childhood; children of every class...
...venerable concept of apprenticeship, which thrived in 18th and 19th century America, will be revived; young people will divide their time between school and training with mentors in areas ranging from carpentry to wildlife biology. At the same time, adult education will boom as workers retrain for new jobs, bone up on developments in fast- moving fields and learn new skills and hobbies for their retirement years...