In 1991 a 5,000-year-old frozen and mummified body was found in the Alps in South Tyrol, Italy. The man was named Ötzi, and recently researchers determined that he was murdered after being shot in the shoulder with an arrow.
Now, scientists have been able to determine what this ancient cave man may have sounded like.
LISTEN: What Ötzi sounds like
“We can’t say we have reconstructed Ötzi’s original voice because we miss some crucial information from the mummy,” Rolando Füstös, chief of the ENT department at Bolzano’s General Hospital, told Discovery News.
“But with two measurements, the length of both the vocal tract and the vocal cords, we have been able to recreate a fairly reliable approximation of the mummy’s voice. This is a starting point for further research,” he added.
Recreating the iceman’s voice was a challenge, in part due to how he was positioned, with his arm across his throat and the fact that his tongue-bone was dislocated and partly absorbed.
But, using special software, the researchers moved his arm, put his head in the proper position and reconstructed the tongue. This gave them a complete model of Ötzi’s vocal cords and mouth. However, they weren’t able to get the tension and density of the vocal cords or the precise thickness of the soft tissues.
READ MORE: Ancient Iceman may have been sick the day he was murdered
They then accounted for Ötzi’s large head and slender body, concluding that he likely had a voice in somewhere in the frequency of 100 Hertz and 150 Hertz, similar to today’s average man.
While it’s only vowels, it’s still interesting to bring a sense of life back to someone who lived so long ago.
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