What would you take with you over a mountain if everything had to be carried on your back or fastened to your clothing?
About 5,300 years ago, a man we now call Ötzi carried a copper axe, a flint dagger, an unfinished bow, and other carefully made equipment into the Alps. Among his belongings were pieces of two different fungi.
That small detail opens up a much bigger question: what did people understand about mushrooms long before microscopes, field guides, and cultivation labs?
Ötzi gives us an unusually close look at fungi as useful materials. Some of what his mushrooms tell us is well supported. Some is still open to interpretation. Both parts are worth a closer look.
On September 19, 1991, hikers Erika and Helmut Simon discovered a body emerging from the ice near Tisenjoch, also called Giogo di Tisa, high in the Alps. The find was on the Italian side of the border with Austria. What initially looked like a mountaineering tragedy turned out to be an extraordinary archaeological discovery. The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology recounts the discovery.
Ötzi had lived during the Copper Age, more than five millennia earlier. His clothing and equipment survived alongside him, giving researchers a rare opportunity to examine the belongings of a particular person. Today, the mummy and his artifacts are housed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.
The fungi deserve a place in that picture right alongside the more obvious tools.
Ötzi’s equipment included two pieces of birch polypore, each threaded onto a separate strip of hide. This species is now called Fomitopsis betulina. Older books and the original studies use Piptoporus betulinus; the name changed following taxonomic research.
A different fungal material was found in his belt pouch: prepared tinder identified as Fomes fomentarius, commonly called tinder fungus. The pouch also held small tools, including a scraper, a boring tool, a bone awl, and a flint flake.
In their 1998 study, The Iceman’s fungi, Ursula Peintner, Reinhold Pöder, and Thomas Pümpel described the fungal objects and the work involved in identifying them. These were altered materials, so the researchers compared microscopic structures and chemical characteristics with modern specimens.
The separate carrying arrangements are a useful detail. They invite us to consider each fungus on its own terms rather than assume that everything fungal in his equipment served the same purpose.
Making a spark is only one part of making a fire. You also need something that can catch it and hold an ember long enough to ignite larger material.
Prepared tinder fungus can do that job. Its inner tissue can be worked into a soft, felt-like material known as amadou. The Science Museum Group preserves examples of amadou in its collection of fire-making equipment, a reminder of how long this material remained useful.
Ötzi’s pouch contained prepared fungal tinder, and the researchers reported traces of pyrite within it. Pyrite can produce sparks when struck with flint. Taken together, the material and those traces strongly support a fire-making role. The evidence is more specific than simply finding a fungus that happens to burn. Peintner and colleagues describe that evidence in the original study.
That puts a familiar woodland organism in a different light. The useful part is its physical structure: fungal tissue becomes a material someone can prepare, carry, and depend on. Choosing it requires knowing what to look for and how to turn it into something that works.
Birch polypore is a firm, rounded bracket associated with birch trees. Look underneath a fresh fruiting body and you’ll find a pale surface covered in tiny pores. Its historical uses include wound dressings and material for polishing razor edges, which explains the common name “razor strop fungus.” Kew’s species profile describes its appearance and traditional uses.
Could Ötzi have carried his pieces as medicine? That’s a reasonable question. The museum presents a possible therapeutic purpose, while acknowledging it as an interpretation.
The most repeated version of the story connects the fungus with intestinal parasites. Researchers found eggs of the whipworm Trichuris trichiura in Ötzi’s intestinal contents, a finding documented in published research on his colon contents. That has encouraged the suggestion that he carried birch polypore to treat the infection.
It’s an intriguing possibility, but the surviving objects don’t tell us that he used them for that purpose. We don’t have a record of how he prepared the fungus, whether he consumed it, or what result he expected. Finding a parasite and a fungus together doesn’t establish a treatment.
Later medicinal traditions can help researchers ask useful questions about an artifact. They can’t, by themselves, tell us what one person intended thousands of years earlier. And even if Ötzi did use birch polypore medicinally, that would not establish its safety or effectiveness for treating an infection today.
The broader lesson is about paying attention to materials.
A grower learns to notice what a fungus does under particular conditions. A person preparing tinder has a different problem to solve, but observation still matters: which tissue works, how it behaves when dry, and whether the finished material is worth carrying.
Ötzi’s equipment suggests that this kind of practical familiarity with fungi has deep roots. The find preserves one person’s belongings; it can’t tell us where that knowledge began or how many people helped develop it.
That leaves plenty to be curious about. Who taught him to prepare tinder? How widely were these fungi used? What other fungal materials disappeared without leaving an archaeological trace?
For anyone interested in mushrooms, there’s something wonderfully concrete here. A fungus growing on a tree could become part of the equipment someone took into the mountains. Thousands of years later, those pieces still have something to teach us, as long as we’re careful about what we ask them to prove.
