Ice Man of the Alps was slain, X-ray shows
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ROME — It took about 5,300 years to find the body and 10 years to perform the autopsy, but researchers in Italy say they know what killed the Iceman: He was shot with an arrow and likely died in agony.
Who fired the arrow — a rival hunter, perhaps, or a warrior in battle — is being investigated as scientists work to reconstruct the life and death of the Bronze Age's best-preserved mummy in search of precious knowledge about that prehistoric time.
The mummy's caretakers announced the discovery yesterday at a news conference in Bolzano, Italy. X-rays "revealed a sensation: a flint arrowhead is visible in the left side of the thorax," said Bruno Hosp, president of the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology.
The Iceman's frozen corpse turned up in the Alps in 1991 when two German hikers noticed it protruding from an Alpine glacier near the Italy-Austria border 11,000 feet above sea level.
The ice also preserved a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts: the metal, wood, fruit, hay, grass, leather and weapons that composed his worldly possessions.
When the Iceman, nicknamed Otzi by researchers, was discovered, scientists speculated he may have fallen asleep and died in the snow or was possibly killed in a fall.
Since then, Otzi and his stuff have been pored over by protohistorians, archaeologists, anthropologists and students of anatomy, medicine, forensic dentistry and nutrition from all over the world. They flock to his refrigerated, chapel-like room at the museum, where visitors can view him through a small window.
So far, researchers have learned from carbon dating that the Iceman lived early in the Bronze Age, which ran from 3500 to 1000 B.C. Microscopic analysis of a sample removed from his intestines last year revealed he ate meat, unleavened bread and an herb or green plant for his last meal.
Pollen in that food tells scientists it was springtime and the Iceman had been in the valley hours before climbing to the heights where he died face-down in a large rock hollow. They have even calculated his age at death: 45 to 50.
But the cause of his demise had been a mystery because the fatal puncture wound was so tiny, barely visible on his shrunken skin.
The X-ray revealing the inch-long arrowhead was made last week using a technique called computerized tomography, which makes a multidimensional image.
The discovery came as scientists were taking new X-rays to study the Iceman's broken ribs, trying to learn how the ribs were bashed, in an attempt to zero in on possible causes of his death.
Eduard Egarter Vigl, the mummy's chief curator, said the arrow was fired into the left side, shattering the scapula and tearing through nerves and major blood vessels before lodging just below the left shoulder near the lung. The Iceman suffered what must have been painful internal bleeding and paralysis of the left arm, the curator said, and probably survived no more than a few hours.
When Otzi was discovered, scientists hailed him as startlingly well-preserved.
They said the body was in such good condition that pores in the skin looked normal; even the eyeballs were preserved behind lids frozen open. His body was discovered along with a copper ax, a bow and some flint arrows with the same kind of arrowhead that some rival or aggressor fired at him.
The death of the Iceman gives archaeologists and historians new insights into his times. He would have been slain 5,300 years ago, before the great Pyramids of Egypt were built and as Europeans were first experimenting with the wheel.
"This changes everything. Now the research on the Iceman starts over," said Alex Susanna, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology.
"Maybe there was a combat, maybe he was in a battle," he said. "There is a whole series of new implications. The story needs to be rewritten."
In September, the museum will host an international conference on the Iceman.
Information from The Washington Post and The Associated Press is included in this report.