Doctors prove that the Iceman was shot to death in the Alps
Munich - Doctors who studied the Iceman, a mummified Stone Age hunter found in Italy in 1991, announced conclusive proof Wednesday that he was shot to death with a flint-tipped arrow rather than dying of exposure as once thought.
"He only lived for a short time after the arrow impact," said Andreas Nerlich, who headed a joint study by Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and experts from Bolzano, Italy.
Shortly before he was shot in the back, the Iceman suffered a non-lethal blow with a blunt object, possibly a stone from a slingshot, Nerlich's team said in a letter to the online journal Intensive Care Medicine.
Explaining the death 5,000 years ago of the hunter, who has been nicknamed Oetzi, has challenged some of the world's best scientists.
The Nerlich team studied chemical changes in living tissue to establish how long each of Oetzi's injuries happened before his death in the snow of the Oetztal glacier in Italy's South Tyrol region.
They said their findings, using new immunohistochemical techniques, of a fatal shot in the back supported the hypothesis that Oetzi was being chased at the time he was killed. The lesion from the blow was just below the arrow strike.
"We're now able to provide information about the age and sequence of wounds," said Nerlich in Munich.
A deep cut in the Iceman's hand, which has already been studied in the past, happened several days earlier, possibly in an accident with his flint knife.
"In the space of a few days he had two injury sequences, which could possibly indicate two separate attacks on him," Nerlich said.
Other scientists estimate Oetzi, who is now on display in the South Tyrol Archaeology Museum in Bolzano, died at age 46. His clothing and weapons offer a window into Stone Age lifestyles.
