AOSTA
She sleeps forever on the rock on which the Lyskamm marmot found her immersed in the ice, the oldest animal mummy in Italy at 6,600 years old, found two years ago on the Monte Rosa massif. In the display that allows everyone to see it from 14 June, at the Natural Sciences Museum of Saint-Pierre, this attention deserves particular praise: it demonstrates respect for this little being and gives credit to those who have taken care of it up to now.
It will soon be given a name, thus consigning it to history as a testimony to the evolution of the climate in the Alps. The specimen, a female according to the analyzes conducted, is welcomed into a super-technological case where it can be housed for the next 500 years. The environment inside is free of oxygen, completely eco-sustainable and independent of electricity, with the possibility of calibrating the chemical-physical parameters if necessary, preventing the deterioration of the mummy.
It was the mountain guide Corrado Gaspard who found her one August morning in 2022, at 4,291 meters above sea level on the Lyskamm, in the municipality of Gressoney-La-Trinité. The immediate realization of being in the presence of a unicum, the involvement of the competent authorities and the helicopter flight alongside Velca Botti, biologist of the Natural Sciences Museum, in charge of the recovery and transport operations of the find to the laboratory.
Botti is part of the study group made up of archaeologists, biologists, geneticists, glaciologists, naturalists and veterinarians who worked on the small mummy, giving life to The Marmot Mummy Project, a project which involved the Eurac Research Institute for the study of mummies in Bolzano . Hence the first data, including radiocarbon dating which dates it back to the mid-Holocene. Also involved are the Universities of Turin and Milan, the Montagna Sicura Foundation, the Superintendence for cultural heritage of the Aosta Valley, the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council (Cnr-Isp) of Messina.
Many question points were addressed starting from the key issue: what was a marmot doing at that altitude? Perhaps in the answer to this question there is another even more important one: what climate was there at the time where the glacier is today, to allow the life of a small herbivore like the marmot? In an era like ours, in which the issue of climate change and the melting of glaciers is increasingly dramatic, the indications provided by the discovery of the Lyskamm mummy say a lot about what the Alps have been and what they could return to to be. And future studies will provide answers without excluding new possible discoveries linked to the increasingly marked thaw at altitude.Amelio Ambrosi
