Iceman
by Brenda Fowler
Random House

In the movies, the mummy stumbled upon by hapless treasure seekers comes back to life, stalks the living, drives men mad for power and wealth, and generally spreads chaos and confusion.

In Brenda Fowler's "Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier," the mummy stumbled on by hapless alpine vacationers does little more than lie in an anatomist's freezer in Innsbruck, but the chaos, confusion, and power-madness he spreads are real enough.

There's just something about a well-preserved corpse.

Ms. Fowler, originally a political correspondent in Eastern Europe, stumbled on the mummy's story herself while vacationing in the area at the time of the find. Asked to write a popular science book on the subject she at first declined. "I was expecting to write about results," said Ms. Fowler at a reading in Chicago, "and I found a story." No sooner is news of the stone-age corpse — the oldest naturally preserved human remains — released to an eager public than strange things begin to happen. Two women write from England to request sperm samples, a man in Austria starts charging visitors to watch him live like the Iceman, and the mummy's genitalia are somehow misplaced.

But the antics within the scientific community are the fascinating heart of Ms. Fowler's book. The mummy's arrival breathes new life into age-old political rivalries between Italian and Austrian claims to the mountains; a highly respected anatomist jealously guards the mummy's flesh against rot, Italians, and scientific rivals; and a few scientists seize on the corpse to make dubious racial claims with whiffs of the Third Reich. Without moving a dried ligament, the mummy becomes a regional icon, a publicity stunt, a popular hero, and a source of fame and income to a band of backwater academics.

And, struggling beside the politics — personal and national — is a lot of fine sleuthing. Ms. Fowler reports on both with clarity and vigor: the careful preservation of the dead man's tattered clothing, the painstaking reconstruction of his climate, diet, and movements from pollen samples found in his equipment and guts. A copper axe found a thousand years before its time throws a wrench in the accepted story of man's technological development, and archeologists, radiologists, experimental anthropologists, and paleobotanists not only cope but thrive on the upset.

At the end of the book there are few hard results but a lot of story, and the great beauty of Ms. Fowler's book is to show that this is what science is. Scientists squabble and preen and hush sources and bear grudges and also carry out precise and ingenious studies and then they tell stories, argue about stories, generate fascinating stories — with good evidence — about how people lived and farmed and ranched and traded long before science, or writing, were imagined.

— Katherine Nagel (knagel@phy.ucsf.edu)