Ötzi could have been the star of the show Tuesday night at science cafe. But he wasn’t.
The night belonged to Alex Straiker, the research scientist who noses into the micro-realm of the brain at Indiana University. Specifically, Straiker investigates cannabinoids and neurons and how the former affects the latter. You want to know why your mouth turns so dry after you smoke a bowl? Straiker knows.
He’s been running Bloomington’s science cafe for the last few years. It was started in these parts by his friend and IU colleague Erika Biga Lee, who copied the idea from a similar regular event she’d caught years ago in Denver. These days, there are scads of science cafes around the world, the idea being experts in nerd and geek fields give informal talks to the public in bars and…, well, cafes. Bloomington’s incarnation has been one of the top draws of this locale for me since I arrived in 2009. It’s essentially a casual college intro class to any subject ranging from nanotechnology to the science of sweetness to placebos and much more. It has bounced from place to place over the years, primarily at Finch’s on Kirkwood but more recently it’s found a home at Friendly Beasts, a cidery on 2nd Street.
Friendly beasts is a tight fit for anything more than a couple of dozen sippers but last night, Straiker’s talk on Ötzi, the poor fellow who died 5300 years ago and whose preserved corpse was found in the ice in a mountain pass on the border between Italy and Austria in 1991, packed the house more than usual. It was his valedictory; he’s shoving off for a research position at the University of Galway within the next couple of weeks.
Straiker (L) & Ötzi
Great for him; too bad for us. Alex was one of the first people I became friendly with when The Loved One and I hit town 17 years ago. He was an habitué of Soma coffeehouse on Grant Street, the first third place I haunted here. (A side note: now that my WFHB history book, How Hard Could It Be, is largely finished, I’ll be moving into more fiction writing. I’ve got an idea to write a novel set in rival coffeehouses, with all the drama, creativity, and humor that can be found among a couple of motley collections of painters, poets, slackers, singer/songwriters, actors, scam artists, junkie-wannabes — oh, you know, the normal cast of characters in any good urban coffeehouse.)
Anyway, I met Alex and his then-wife, the painter, language maven, and children’s book author Anna Witte, at Soma. Knowing the two of them opened up a huge door for me in this town. They started me off on my now-decade and a half-plus journey to find community in Bloomington. Anna left these parts years ago for the Pacific Northwest. Now Alex is giving us the breeze for Ireland.
His talk on Ötzi was fun and informative and what more could you ask for from a free college-level lecture in a place where you can also get boozed up? Generally, science cafe speakers are experts in their particular fields but last night, for Alex’s final presentation, he decided to take the stage and I must say, his may have been the best science cafe I’ve been to yet.
Because he had to immerse himself in a cram course on the corpse, he dug up and presented info any lay person might find compelling, more so than that an Ötzi specialist might think relevant. You may recall Ötzi — a couple of hikers on an Alps mountain gap stumbled upon his remains, partially embedded in the ice and spectacularly preserved as no such similar body that has ever been found before.
Researchers dug the old bird up and found a treasure trove of clues about his life, from what appeared to be medicinal seeds and herbs he carried in a pouch, to the grains of pollen found in his belly, to the kind of shoes he wore. (Apparently, he cobbled his own shoes — they had bearskin soles, deerskin uppers, and a mixture of grass and tree bark inside for insulation, perfect for protecting his dogs from the Tyrolean high-altitude ice.
Replicas of Ötzi’s shoes
An arrow head was found in Ötzi’s shoulder, leading researchers to conclude he’d been shot from behind and bled to death. Ötzi also had an apparently recent hand injury consistent, police forensics experts said, with fending off a knife attack. It appeared that Ötzi’s valuables — his straw cape, his bearskin cap, the bow he’d been carving, the copper axe he carried, and other gear — hadn’t been swiped. Who killed Ötzi and why? No one knows. One of the sections of Alex’s talk was “Murder or Justice?” Could Ötzi have been, in Alex’s words, “a jerk?” Was he some kind of marauding loner who terrorized nearby communities? Or was he the unlucky victim of random violence?
I like to think Ötzie was a sheep rustler. The gap where he was found was a well-traveled path for sheepherders to move their ovine gangs from one valley pasture to another.
Ötzi can be seen, through thick Plexiglas, in a cooler at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, Italy.
More fascinating factoids: at first reconstructors and imagineers made a model of what Ötzi might have looked at when he was alive. Advances in DNA knowledge since then have shown that the early image was too white. The people who lived around the area 5300 years ago, DNA studies have shown, were much more dark-skinned so he would have been, too. Ötzi suffered from male-pattern baldness; he suffered from an early form of Lyme disease; and he had dozens of tattoos all over his body.
I know all that, and more, now, thanks to Alex Straiker and science cafe. Erika Biga Lee will carry on as the producer of the local science cafe series. In fact the next session will be some time in September.
Last night’s session was bittersweet. I’m happy for Alex; he seems excited about the new challenge in his life. I’m sad, too, that he’s leaving. He’s already pledged to start up a science cafe in Galway. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could make it to all its sessions.