PAST CRIMESbefore he died, a time period estimated from the degree of digestion of the
pollens. The pollens also indicated that he died in the spring or early
summer. He had recently eaten wheat, possibly in the form of bread or a
porridge, dried sloes, and venison meat. Researchers also found that he had
very bad teeth (and almost certainly bad breath), possibly caused by his
diet, which would have been rich in starches. He seems to have had a very
low sperm count. Recent DNA analysis revealed that he also suffered from
Lyme disease, which is spread by ticks. He was a short man, just five feet
two inches tall, had brown eyes, was lactose intolerant, had a predisposition
to heart disease, and was related, very remotely, to a modern Corsican or
Sardinian population!
He would have come from a small farming community, living in timber
houses, and keeping sheep or goats. They were growing spelt wheat, and
gathered fruit and wood from the surrounding forests, where they also hunted
deer and chamois. It would have been typical of a large number of Neolithic
settlements that had spread across Europe during the two or three thousand
years since the introduction of farming and potterymaking to the region.
Further examination of the body itself had begun in 2001, ten years after
the initial find. New Xrays were taken, which revealed an object in the left
shoulder– a flint arrowhead. It had penetrated the shoulder blade and
severed a major blood vessel.Őtzi would have bled to death from such a
wound, although as the clotted blood in the wound had started to degrade,
his death would have been slow. Further damage to his hand in the form of
a deep cut, and a number of bruises, suggest that he had been in a fight
before he died.
Detailed forensic study has established that someone pulled the arrowshaft
out fromŐtzi’s back, but the arrowhead itself remained wedged in his body.
Some of the injuries he had sustained, however, were beginning to heal,
suggesting that the fight he was involved in had lasted for several days.
Some unconfirmed DNA analyses have claimed that traces of blood from
four other people were present on his equipment and clothing–one person’s
blood on his knife, two others on the same arrowhead (which means he must
have retrieved it after shooting two different people), and one on his coat. It is
suggested that the amount of blood on the coat resulted from him carrying a
wounded comrade on his back.
At some point shortly before death, he had fallen or been hit on the back of
the head–there was a major bleed in the rear section of his brain, in which the
condition of the blood proteins indicated a very recent injury. So it may have
been this fall or blow which finally killed him.^13