Basajaun and Iceman

 

Jay Cooney made this paste-up comparing the Basajaun photo from the Pyrenees mountains to the reconstrictions of the Minnesota Iceman as published by Bernard Heuvelmans. He subsequently decided not to publish the piece right away but gave me the permission to do so.

 

Jay BizarreZoo Cooney

Can you quickly tell me the main differences between the "real" iceman and the copy? I'm not gonna write much to go along with the comparison but I'd like to say that at least
 

Dale Drinnon

Very simple: Ivan Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans gave very long and very exacting descriptions of the original Iceman. Among its other features, it had apparently been shot in one eye and had the other eye bugged out of the socket. Nothing like that in the copy. Ivan Sanderson thought that the individual body hairs lightened in colour at the tip, a pattern similar to the fur of the agouti and called the agouti pattern. John Napier thought that was a suspicious reference and could indicate a model had been implanted with hairs from an agouti (a large South American rodent) in this new model there is nothing like that, the hairs are uniformly solid black and look like the hairs out of a wig. And among its other unusual features Sanderson noted a large pad or callus at the heel of the hand. Napier also thought that was suspicious, the now model does not show that. Not only is this model NOT the original, but it seems somebody has taken the pains to leave out all of the overly unusual or potentially suspicious traits [Jay Cooney said it was his impression that the original had its mouth shut not showing much of the teeth and the replacement model had its mouth more open and showing more of the teeth: he thought this was a significant enough difference to make an important point]

Whoever made up the new model was smart, but it seems like they were a little TOO smart and they gave themselves away because of it