When hikers in 1991 found the mummified body of a man emerging from a glacier in the Tyrolean Alps, they could not have imagined that along with his copper tools and unfinished bow they would also find two species of fungi, carefully carried by someone who died more than five thousand years ago.
Two fungi, two purposes
Ötzi — named after the Ötztal region where he was found — carried fragments of tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius) in his belt pouch and two perforated pieces of birch polypore (Fomitopsis betulina, then classified as Piptoporus betulinus) strung on a leather thong around his neck. Archaeomycological analysis published in 1998 confirmed that the carbonized material in his pouch was tinder prepared expressly for transporting fire — a survival technology based entirely on a fungus.
Medicine from five millennia ago?
The second fungus raises a different question. Birch polypore is not used to make fire, but it does possess documented antibacterial and antiparasitic activity. Given that later analyses of Ötzi's intestines revealed an infestation by the parasite Trichuris trichiura, some researchers have proposed that he carried the fungus as self-medication — a plausible hypothesis, although not conclusively proven.
A much broader tradition
A later review of European medicinal polypores documents that, in addition to Fomes fomentarius and Fomitopsis betulina, species such as Laetiporus sulphureus, Fomitopsis pinicola, and Laricifomes officinalis were widely used in Central European folk medicine to treat everything from dysmenorrhea to lung conditions. Ötzi's fungal baggage was not an isolated case, but archaeological evidence of a relationship between humans and fungi at least five thousand years deep.
References
- Peintner U, Pöder R, Pümpel T. The iceman's fungi. Mycol Res. 1998;102(10):1153-1162. DOI: 10.1017/S0953756298006546
- Grienke U, Zöll M, Peintner U, Rollinger JM. European medicinal polypores – a modern view on traditional uses. J Ethnopharmacol. 2014;154(3):564-583. PMID: 24786572. DOI: 10.1016/j.jep.2014.04.030