Iceman's Stomach Bug Gives Clues To Humans' Spread Into Europe
South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter The Iceman (reconstruction by Adrie and Alfons Kennis) Some 5,300 years ago, high in the Italian Alps, an ancient crime scene unfolded. Having fled high up into the mountains from mystery attackers, a man, aged 40 or 50 years—quite old for the time—was shot through the shoulder with an arrow. The sharpened stone arrowhead lacerated his subclavian artery and he bled out, dying within minutes. Slowly his body folded into the sides of the glacier under blankets of snow and ice. There it remained until many millennia later, in 1991, when two Austrian mountaineers stumbled upon his preserved, mummified body. The Iceman, otherwise known as Ötzi, is perhaps the most intensively studied mummy ever. Everything about him, his insides and his outsides, has been explored. The...