It was four years ago that a vacationing German couple happened across a well-preserved body lying face-down in a slushy pocket of glacier in the Italian Alps. Since this chance discovery of what turned out to be a 5,300-year-old corpse, the world's oldest known human-flesh remains, scientists and archaeologists have teased out remarkable information on the man and his environment from the equipment and clothing found with him.
A bit of ember he carried to restart his campfire was from a tree likely to have grown south of the spot where he died. That evidence suggested he was on his way from the fertile Venosta Valley in northern Italy and had probably made his home there. A grain of domesticated wheat clinging to his fur clothing indicated that he had had contact with civilization, which in those days and parts would have been a small farming village.In the past year, studies of the Iceman, as the body is known, have moved beyond his accouterments to his flesh. His guardians at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where he is being preserved at glacial temperature and humidity, have at last opened up the corpse itself to research. Using specially designed titanium instruments that leave no trace elements, doctors have snipped off tiny samples from the man's shrunken organs and tissues and delivered them to scientists in Europe and the United States for studies that are slowly building answers to the questions about the man's life and death.
In September, Dr. Werner Platzer, the Innsbruck anatomist who oversees research on the body, announced that preliminary findings showed the man's stomach was empty when he died. But his large intestine contained considerable amounts of material.
"That means he had probably not eaten for eight hours," Platzer said in a telephone interview, adding that the contents of the large intestine were being investigated now. The finding, which had been predicted by radiologists' interpretations of CAT scans, hinted that the man may have been hungry and weak when he died. A hypothesis that has strong support among scientists is that he died of hypothermia after being surprised by one of the sudden snowstorms that come up on the Hauslabjoch, the 10,500-foot pass over the main ridge where he was found.
Other new findings suggest that the man had not been in perfect health. Dr. Andrew Jones, an environmental archaeologist at the Archaeological Resource Centre in York, England, identified the eggs of a parasitic whipworm in a small sample from the man's colon. The preliminary results do not reveal how severe the infestation was, and Dr. Jones could not say whether the parasites caused the man any discomfort. Light cases often go unnoticed , but severe infestations carry severe symptoms, Jones said, and even a moderate infestation may have weakened the man.
Another potential vulnerability appeared in the man's lungs, where Dr. Raul J. Cano, a microbiologist at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, recently found a fungus called Aspergillus, most likely the species fumigatus.
"I know that Aspergillus has been associated with lung disease, but we have no reason to believe he died of anything other than natural causes," said Cano, who isolated the DNA of the fungus. And last year doctors found that the lungs were as black as a smoker's, probably a result of living in a shelter with an open hearth.
Discussion of what caused the man's death has been complicated from the start by X-rays that show five broken ribs on his right side. Radiologists are unable to determine whether these fractures occurred before the man's death, under the weight of the glacier or during the rough recovery.
"There are so many rib fractures, they're angled, the chest is severely decreased in diameter, and the posterior ribs are dislocated from the spine," said Dr. William A. Murphy Jr., the head of diagnostic imaging at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and one of the radiologists who has studied the thousands of X-rays and CT scans of the body. "It's my opinion that it would take significant force to do that, and I can imagine that force from the weight of ice."
But neither he nor Dr. Dieter zur Nedden, his Austrian colleague, believes the question will soon be laid to rest. That keeps alive the theory of Dr. Konrad Spindler, the University of Innsbruck prehistorian who proposed that the man had been involved in a fight in his village, then fled into the mountains, where he succumbed to his injuries.
There are, indeed, signs that the man's life had not been easy. Dr. Horst Seidler, an anthropologist at the University of Vienna, said the man may have lived through episodes of extreme hunger, illness or metal poisoning that arrested his growth. Examining X-rays of the man's shinbone, Seidler and his colleagues found 17 Harris lines, thin layers of bony material that form in the hollow of a bone when growth stops. They calculated that severe disturbances occurred in the man's 9th, 15th and 16th years.
"Possibly this had to do with periods of hunger in the transition between seasons," Seidler said.
One of Seidler's next projects is to compare tissue samples from the Iceman with those of the 500-year-old Peruvian girl whose discovery on an Andes mountain was announced in October.
"These two finds were conserved in the same condition," said Seidler, who was recently in Peru. "This is the first time we've had material with which to compare him."
Other findings illuminate the man's activities during his life. In September, Dr. Don Brothwell, an archaeologist at the University of York in England, announced that his team had detected unusually large amounts of copper on the surface of the man's hair. In a telephone interview Brothwell suggested that the prehistoric man, who was found with a copper ax, may have been involved in the processing of copper, the first metal smelted.