Scientists Put Together Last Hours of Frozen Stone Age Hunter

Forensic scientists have reconstructed the last two meals of a man who died 5,000 years ago, and perhaps worked out why he died.

Otzi the Iceman, who was found frozen in a glacier in 1991, perished in the new stone age while crossing an alpine pass between Austria and Italy. He wore leather clothes and carried a bow and arrows and a copper axe. His shoes, of bear and deerskin, were stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm. Otherwise, almost everything about him was a mystery. It was conjectured that he was possibly a human sacrifice, or a metallurgist.

Researchers assumed he had frozen to death. Only when they thawed his flesh last year at the South Tyrol archeological museum at Bolzano in Italy, did they find a stone arrowhead in his left shoulder. Now they believe he was a hunter.

Franco Rollo, of the University of Camerino in Italy, and colleagues report in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analysis of Otzi's intestine and colon enabled them to build a picture of his last hours.

The stomach and gut contained the DNA of plants, animals and fungi. Some were spores that had blown on to whatever he had eaten, but it was enough to tell them that he had travelled through a coniferous forest on the lower slopes, where he had eaten a meal of grain, plants, and ibex meat. And that he had had a second meal, of red deer, before he reached the high rocky pass where he died.

Last year, scientists in Glasgow found whipworm eggs in Otzi's bowel, suggesting a severe intestinal problem, which would have weakened him. But it seems a flint arrow hit him in the back, penetrating the shoulder blade and just missing his lung. Stone age hunters are thought to have always aimed there, because this gave them the best chance of killing at first shot. "It seems to us much more reasonable to assume that, rather than a ritual sacrifice, he had been the victim of some rivalry among hunters," the Italian team said.