Ötzi the Iceman fire making kit put to the test. Neolithic Iceman Copper age fire making technology.

High up in the Ötztal Alps a man took his last breath, fatally wounded. He would not be discovered until 5300 years later. The discovery of Ötzi the Iceman is one of the great archeological finds of the 20th century. But how did he made fire? He carried flint and tinder fungus, but no pyrite. Why? Can we reveal Ötzis neolithic fire making secret?

Ötzi the iceman is the holy grail of glacial archaeology, nothing less. The discovery of the 5300-year-old mummified body and the associated artefacts created a media frenzy and great public interest. Today, 250000 people visit the Ötzi Museum in Bolzano each year to get a glimpse of Ötzi and the exhibited artefacts. A wealth of scientific papers, popular books and documentaries have been published.

Ötzi was discovered in 1991 in a gully at the Tisenjoch pass close to the Italian/Austrian border. The original interpretation by the Innsbruck-based archaeologist Konrad Spindler was that Ötzi froze to death in the gully. He was quickly covered by a glacier and remained encased in ice until he melted out in 1991 (https://secretsoftheice.com/news/2018....

In this video I show how to make a fire using two stones, as it was done during the copper age and also during the major part of the paleolithic period and our human history. The steps gone through are making a tinder bundle ("birds nest"), going through the stones required, the tinder material, including processing, ember creation, transfer of the ember to the tinder bundle and blowing it into flames.

I have made another video on the topic earlier (where I actually succeeded in making fire with flint and pyrite):    • How Ötzi made fire. Ötzis copper age ...  

Image sources: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, https://www.iceman.it/en/