A team of botanists and anatomists has produced a close-up view of the last wanderings of Ötzi the Iceman, the frozen 5200-year-old mummy found in the Alps in 1991, from the pollen in his digestive tract.
By various delicate procedures, researchers led by botanist Klaus Oeggl of the University of Innsbruck in Austria extracted five gut samples--representing at least three different meals--from the end of the small intestine to the rectum. Comparing the pollen with modern reference samples from known locations, the scientists tracked Ötzi's path in roughly his last 33 hours. "Background" pollen in the intestine closer to the rectum reflected alpine vegetation, whereas the transverse colon had pollen from tree species common in the valley. Contents of the ileum indicated that he ate his last meal back in the subalpine pine and spruce forests.
The scientists, whose analysis appears in the latest issue of Quaternary Science Reviews, say the results lend new weight to the "disaster" theory of Ötzi's death. It holds that he walked down from subalpine regions perhaps to his native village, got in a fight, and fled to the mountain glacier, where he apparently died from an arrow wound in the upper back. The reconstruction of the Iceman's final journey is "an extremely exquisite piece of work," says geoscientist Wolfgang Müller of the Royal Holloway University of London in Surrey. "Before, it was largely speculation. Now it is pinned down with scientific evidence."
