Ötzi the iceman was murdered more than 5,000 years ago. HIT PLAY, above, to see an X-ray of Ötzi's chest.
Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology
X-ray examination and CT scan revealed an arrowhead in Ötzi's left shoulder.
Credit: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology
It sounds like the opening to a television forensics drama. On a sunny September day in 1991, a German couple hiking through the Alps make a gruesome discovery.
Initially, the corpse partially jutting out of the melting ice is thought to be from a recent mountaineering accident. But on closer inspection, a far more stunning revelation emerges. The body is that of a murder victim; a murder that transpired five millennia ago.
Dated to around 5,300 years old, the remarkably well-preserved Neolithic Iceman came to be known as Ötzi, after the Ötztal region of the Austrian-Italian border where he was found.
In the years since his discovery, he has been subject to countless, delicate examinations. Now, three recent studies give us the most definitive account of how the Iceman came to be slain.
"The unique thing about this find is that a man has been preserved in full dress with all his equipment," says Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where Ötzi resides today.
It's not only the Iceman's age, but the 'wet' nature of the mummification process that makes him so scientifically valuable, she adds. "The tissue is therefore elastic; a lucky circumstance, as some scientific examinations would otherwise have been impossible."
"Ötzi is much older than any other glacier mummy and is a very rare case in which mummification took place by dehydration before the body became embedded in glacier ice," say researchers led by Klaus Oeggl of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
"Even the food residue in his digestive tract was very well preserved, and a test sample provided evidence of his diet, environment, and season of death."
Oeggl's team have used the remains of Ötzi's last meals (including ibex, grains and red deer meat) and tiny traces of different pollens, to reveal his whereabouts over his last 33 hours with surprising clarity.
"Ötzi's movements in his last days from sub-alpine regions down to the valley bottoms and then up to alpine regions again, as well as his lethal injury by an arrowhead, confirm that Ötzi's last days were hectic and violent, which corroborates parts of [the] disaster theory," they write.
This disaster theory, first proposed by the University of Innsbruck's Konrad Spindler in 1995, purports that Ötzi came into conflict with others several days before his death, and sustained knife wounds to his hand. He then fled into the mountains and was in the process of fashioning a longbow and quiver of arrows to defend himself.
The precise cause of Ötzi's death has been debated for years, but in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team including radiologist Paul Gostner of the Bolzano General Hospital in Italy argue that Ötzi was almost certainly killed by the stone arrowhead embedded in his shoulder.
death
Now why would someone club the guy over the head, roll him over to pull out a wood arrow shaft- and then leave him with a valuable ax, knife and bow & quiver? More likely this guy wasn't the sheep herder they say but more likely some outlaw who ran afowl of some folks who knew what he was and injured him in such a manner as he died from those wounds after escaping capture.
otzi
If Otzi is from haptlogroup K might he be of ashkenazi descent?