Hello and welcome to Queer As Facts, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Alice.

I'm Irene.

I'm Eli.

And I'm Jase.

And today we're talking about the 5,000-year-old Ice Mommy Ertsy the Iceman.

Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that we're recording this podcast today on the lands of the Bonarong-Bunurang people and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

They are the custodians of an oral history tradition far older than this podcast.

We have some content warnings for this episode.

This episode will include discussions of the scientific analysis of a corpse,

discussions of murder, one instance of swearing in quotes, discussions of sex and discussions of homophobia. If any of that's something you don't want to hear, feel free

just skip this episode and check out our other content. So, on the 19th of September, 1991,

two German hikers, Erica and Helmut Simon, were walking in the Earthstall Elps near the border of Italy and Austria when they came across a human corpse trapped in the ice. Imagine if that happened on your walk, though. It's not, you know, what you want when you go for a nice little mountain trick. That's definitely the cold open for a horror movie. Yes. Was that a pun? Yeah, I guess it was. I mean, wouldn't you just be like, oh, thank God this guy's like 5,000 years old? Yeah. Yeah, they did not know he was 5,000 years old for a while when they found him. Oh, okay. I have spoiled that for you in the intro. But yeah, when they found this corpse, they assumed it was another mountaineer who had, you know,

relatively recently died in some kind of accident and being buried in the snow. And so they

ended up reporting the fine to the police. They reported it to both the Austrian and the Italian

police because they were up in the mountains and not sure which side of the border they were

actually on because those mountains are the border between Austria and Italy. Did they have a big argument being like, no, you take the corpse? And then they realized it was a significant corpse. And they were like, no, let me take the corpse. I didn't look into like arguments over who owns the corpse. But I understand that there must have been an argument because it originally went to Austria, just because I think that was more convenient at the time.

And then they discovered there was actually like less than 100 metres into Italy.

And it's now in a museum in Italy.

So at some stage, Italy must have been like, no, we actually own.

Like, give that to us.

Is it okay to say it about a human person?

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