Otzi the freeze-dried 5300 year old Tyrolean man/mummy continues to be studied and his corpse regularly yields new information.
Otzi was about 45 years old, stood 5'3" and weighed only about 110 pounds. He had been wounded with an arrow in the shoulder which pierced an artery. He may have bled to death or, alternatively, died from a blow to the head. He had brown eyes, a dark beard, and long dark brown hair. He was wearing a bearskin hat, a goat loincloth, a goat cloak, and goat leggings with deerskin laces. His shoes were complex -- bearskin soles and deerskin uppers and were lined with hay -- presumably for both comfort and insulation. He had a calfskin belt in which he carried flint and bone tools, including a flint dagger, a large bow and a quiver of chamois hide reinforced with hazelwood. The quiver contained unfinished arrows made of shoots from the guelder rose tree. He had a container constructed of birch bark. He carried equipment for lighting a fire -- a flammable fungus, a piece of pyrite, and a flint. Otzi also carried a woven net for trapping prey and a mat made of grass fibers which probably served as a raincoat. And frameworks of hazel twigs that most likely were snowshoes. His outfit consisted of materials drawn from 18 different kinds of wood. His last meal, consumed two hours before his death, was of various unidentified plant material, and a helping of ibex meat. Otzi was lactose intolerant. His skin was marked in about 50 places with "tattoos" where charcoal had been rubbed into incisions. Some ribs (he lacked a twelfth rib) and his nose bone had been previously broken but had healed. He carried a stone ax with a copper edge --a rare and expensive possession. To judge from the traces of arsenic in his body he might have been a copper smith. An analysis of his mitochondria revealed that he belonged to haplogroup K which was a typical marker of members of the farming culture that was then expanding into Europe. His closest relatives today are found on Corsica and Sardinia. He also belonged to a Y-chromosome haploid group G which which is also associated with migrating farmers. He had a rare mutation known as G-L91 which has been discovered in 19 contemporary residents of the Tyrol. He was not healthy. His knee joints were in bad shape and caused him considerable pain, his teeth were worn down and inflamed, his lungs show traces of soot particles probably from living in badly ventilated spaces. He suffered from Lyme disease, rheumatism, intestinal parasites, hardened arteries, gallstones, and an ugly growth on his little toe perhaps caused by frostbite. It would appear that he had had a hard life.
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