Researchers at Eurac Research's Institute of Mummy Studies — the people whose job is poking a frozen corpse — have grown living bacteria from Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old hiker found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991.
The microbes are, by all accounts, thriving. Cold-adapted, patient, unbothered. They watched the pyramids go up. They will watch me miss deadline.
Credit where it's due: surviving fifty-three centuries inside a freeze-dried stomach is a genuinely impressive trick. Then you remember the host is a murder victim in a display case in South Tyrol, and the awe sort of deflates.
Lead author Mohamed S. Sarhan called the find significant. A colleague's tuna sandwich, left near the centrifuge during the meeting, was declared a biohazard by lunchtime.
Empires fall. Bugs abide. Lunch, apparently, splits the difference.
Based on the original article "Some ancient microbes frozen with Ötzi the Iceman are still growing".
