Natural Curiosities: The Iceman’s Stuff Cometh

On an unusually warm summer’s day in 2006, a carpenter with an amateur archaeologist’s eye for artifacts stumbled across an old leather shoe while hiking the Lendbreen ice patch in Oppland County, Norway. He pocketed the shoe and carried it with him down the mountain so it could be examined by curators at the Norwegian Mountain Museum in the nearby town of Lom. Perplexed by the find, the museum sought help from archaeologists, who dated the shoe. Nobody expected the astonishing result: It was thirty-four hundred years old, the shoe of a Bronze Age Norwegian, and remarkably well-preserved by the ice for footwear that predated the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. That warm Norwegian summer, and those that preceded it, meant the ice patch was slowly receding, and as it did it exposed this leathery bit of prehistory.

The archaeologists immediately wondered: What else was being spit out by that ice patch? They gathered their crampons, axes, and expedition tents and headed up the mountain