The Salt Man was discovered in Iran, in the Chehrabad salt mines located in Zanjan Province. In the winter of 1993, miners came across a body with long hair, a beard and some artifacts. These included the remains of a body, a foreleg inside a leather boot, three iron knives, a woolen half trouser, a silver needle, a sling, parts of a leather rope, a grind stone, a walnut, some pottery shards, some designed textile fragments, and finally a few broken bones. Visual characteristics presented long hair and beard and a golden earring on the left ear indicating that he was a high ranked man. Five other corpses, including a woman, were discovered later in the same salt mine. Samples of these salt men and their belongings including their clothes had previously been sent to Oxford and Cambridge universities to be dated by implementing genetics studies and DNA analysis. The results showed that the first two discovered salt men belong to the Sassanid dynastic period (224-651 AD) while the last three are dated to the Achaemenid dynastic era 9550-330 BC).
This salt man was dated to about 1700 years ago. By testing a sample of hair, the blood group B+ was also determined.