Oetzi was also the beneficiary of capital investment. He lived right at the beginning of the metal age, when copper was first being smelted. His pristine copper axe, 99.7 per cent pure, had been smelted in a furnace that had consumed a lot of somebody’s capital to build. The chaff in his clothing came from a grain crop grown with invested capital in the form of stored seeds and stored labour. For Adam Smith capital is ‘as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion’
