When the Iceman Ötzi was discovered in the Ötztal Alps, on the border of Italy and Austria, in 1991, researchers were taken aback by his natural preservation.
Ötzi, who lived between 3350 and 3105 BC, is believed to have been killed after an arrowhead was found lodged in his left shoulder. The circumstances of his passing have generated a great deal of interest and research throughout the years.
Ötzi's Preservation
The latest study on Ötzi is drawing interest from academics. Evidence was uncovered by a small team of researchers from Norway, Sweden, and Austria that claims a flaw in the original theory of how Ötzi was preserved for such a long time, as reported first by Phys and Interesting Engineering.
Konrad Spindler, an Austrian archaeologist, came up with a theory to explain how Ötzi's remains had endured for so long. He hypothesized that the body had been held in cold storage for a considerable amount of time after being freeze-dried, encased in the ice beneath a glacier, and protected from its movement by a gully.
His remains weren't found until the ice he had been trapped in melted because of climate change. Ötzi's case was unique because of a sequence of circumstances that made it unlikely that anybody else would ever encounter the same experience.
The researchers in this new study reportedly question nearly every aspect of Spindler's idea, according to the Phys. They only take into account the reason for death as being precise.
They argue that the presence of food in Ötzi's stomach indicates that he died in the spring and not during the fall.
Since the landscape research showed that the remnants had not been encased in a glacier, the team claims that Ötzi had likely been repeatedly melted out of the ice. The researchers also found evidence that Ötzi had submerged himself in water several times.
The evidence, according to the team, suggests that Ötzi's tools and weaponry were damaged by the weather instead of a conflict with an unknown adversary.
Ötzi may have also been dragged down the mountain by environmental forces rather than dying in the gully where he was found, according to evidence uncovered by the researchers.
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More Ötzi's to Come
The researchers came to the conclusion that more remnants comparable to Ötzi's will likely be discovered as the area continues to warm since their evidence indicates that the Ice Man's may have endured for such a long time under normal conditions.
The death's cause remained a mystery ten years after the body was uncovered. Initially, it was believed that Ötzi had died after getting caught in a winter storm.
It was then speculated that Ötzi might have been a ritual victim sacrificed as retaliation for his status as a chieftain. This theory was inspired by earlier hypotheses concerning the Tollund Man and the Lindow Man, two bodies discovered in peat bogs in the first millennium BC.
The team's findings were published in the journal The Holocene on November 7.
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Written by Jace Dela Cruz
