From the Old Gray Whore:
Who Killed the Iceman? Clues Emerge in a Very Cold Case
By
ROD NORDLAND
March
26, 2017
BOLZANO,
Italy — When the head of a small Italian museum called Detective
Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police, she asked him if he
investigated cold cases.
“Yes
I do,” Inspector Horn said, recalling their conversation.
“Well,
I have the coldest case of all for you,” said Angelika Fleckinger,
director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, in Bolzano, Italy.
The
unknown victim, nicknamed Ötzi, has literally been in cold storage
in her museum for a quarter-century. Often called the Iceman, he is
the world’s most perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper Age fellow who
had been frozen inside a glacier along the northern Italian border
with Austria until warming global temperatures melted the ice and two
hikers discovered him in 1991.
The
cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years later, when an X-ray
of the mummy pointed to foul play in the form of a flint arrowhead
embedded in his back, just under his shoulder. But now, armed with a
wealth of new scientific information that researchers have compiled,
Inspector Horn has managed to piece together a remarkably detailed
picture of what befell the Iceman on that fateful day around 3300
B.C., near the crest of the Ötztal Alps.
“When
I was first contacted with the idea, I thought it was too difficult,
too much time has passed,” said Inspector Horn, a noted profiler.
“But actually he’s in better condition than recent homicide
victims I’ve worked on who have been found out in the open.”
The
mummy on display at the museum. There are a few mummies in the world
as old, but none so well preserved.
There
are a few mummies in the world as old as Ötzi, but none so well
preserved. Most were ritually prepared, which usually meant removal
of internal organs, preservation with chemicals or exposure to
destructive desert conditions.
The
glacier not only froze Ötzi where he had died, but the high humidity
of the ice also kept his organs and skin largely intact. “Imagine,
we know the stomach contents of a person 5,000 years ago,”
Inspector Horn said. “In a lot of cases we are not able to do that
even now.”
Those
contents, as it turned out, were critical in determining with
surprising precision what happened to Ötzi and even helped shed
light on the possible motive of his killer.
The
more scientists learn, the more recognizable the Iceman becomes. He
was 5 feet 5 inches tall (about average height for his time), weighed
110 pounds, had brown eyes and shoulder-length, dark brown hair, and
a size 7½ foot. He was about 45, give or take six years, respectably
old for the late Neolithic age — but still in his prime.
Ötzi
had the physique of a man who did a lot of strenuous walking but
little upper-body work; there was hardly any fat on his body. He had
all of his teeth, and between his two upper front teeth was a
3-millimeter gap, an inherited condition known as diastema, which
Madonna and Elton John also have.
When
viewed through the window of the museum’s freezer, where he is kept
now, his hands not only appear unusually small, but they also show
little sign of hard use, suggesting that Ötzi was no manual laborer.
Every
modern murder investigation relies heavily on forensic science, but
in Ötzi’s case, the techniques have been particularly high tech,
involving exotic specialties like archaeobotany and paleometallurgy.
From
examining traces of pollen in his digestive tract, scientists were
able to place the date of Ötzi’s death at sometime in late spring
or early summer. In his last two days, they found, he consumed three
distinct meals and walked from an elevation of about 6,500 feet, down
to the valley floor and then up into the mountains again, where he
was found at the crime site, 10,500 feet up.
On
his body was one prominent wound, other than the one from the
arrowhead: a deep cut in his right hand between the thumb and
forefinger, down to the bone and potentially disabling. By the degree
of healing seen on the wound, it was one to two days old.
From
this, Inspector Horn surmises that Ötzi may have come down to his
village and become embroiled in a violent altercation. “It was a
very active defensive wound, and interesting in the context that no
other injuries are found on the body, no major bruises or stab
wounds, so probably he was the winner of that fight, even possibly he
killed the person who tried to attack him,” he said.
The
area where the Iceman was from. The crime scene was in the mountains,
10,500 feet up.
Then
he left, fully provisioned with food, the embers of a fire preserved
in maple leaf wrappings inside a birch-bark cylinder, and quite a lot
of other equipment, most of it probably carried in a backpack with a
wooden frame. For weapons he had only a flint dagger so small it
seemed to be the Copper Age equivalent of a derringer, a
six-foot-long stave for a bow that had not yet been completed; and a
beautifully crafted deerskin quiver with a dozen arrows, only two of
them with arrowheads attached.
Inspector
Horn reckons Ötzi was in no hurry. At 10,500 feet, he made what
appeared to be a camp in a protected gully on the mountain saddle,
spreading his belongings around and sitting down to his last meal.
“Roughly
half an hour before his death he was having a proper meal, even a
heavy meal,” Inspector Horn said. The Copper Age menu was well
balanced, consisting of ibex meat, smoked or raw; einkorn wheat (an
early domesticated variety), possibly in the form of bread; some sort
of fat, which might have been from bacon or cheese; and bracken, a
common fern.
There
is even evidence that some of his food was recently cooked. “If
you’re in a rush and the first thing is to get away from someone
trying to kill you, that’s not what you do,” he said. Ötzi’s
longbow was only half a day’s work from completion, he added, but
there was no sign that he was working on it at the time.
Half
an hour after Ötzi dined, the killer came along and shot him in the
back from a distance of almost 100 feet. The arrow went under his
left armpit and ripped through a roughly half-inch section of his
subclavian artery, a wound that would have been quickly fatal and
probably not treatable even in modern times, especially where it
happened. By the angle of the wound, he was either shot from below
and behind, or he had been bent forward when he was hit from above
and behind.
“The
aim of the offender was to kill him, and he decides to take a
long-distance shot — could be a learning effect from what happened
one or two days before,” Inspector Horn said. “Which is pretty
much what you see all the time nowadays. Most homicides are personal,
and follow violence and an escalation of violence. I want to follow
him, find him and kill him. All the emotions we have in homicide,
these things have not died out in all these years.”
Robbery
can certainly be ruled out, he said. Ötzi had a copper ax, a
valuable artifact only rarely seen in burials of the period. His
clothing and kit were a match for the harsh alpine climate, and
probably valuable, made from the leather and fur of at least 10
animals of six species.
“This
was not a robbery gone bad or something,” Inspector Horn said;
clearly, the killer was trying to cover up his act. “You go back to
your village with this unusual ax, it would be pretty obvious what
had happened.”
Ötzi’s
cold case continues to yield surprises to scientists in many
disciplines who still are studying his remains. Last year, for
example, they discovered that he was infected with an unusual strain
of H. pylori, the bacteria believed responsible for ulcers today.
There
is one thing they are unlikely to discover, as Inspector Horn noted
with a chuckle. “I’m not optimistic we’ll find the offender in
Ötzi’s case.”
Both
in life and in death, the Iceman seems uncannily familiar to his
modern descendants, said the museum’s deputy director, Katharina
Hersel.
“He
is so close to us. He uses the same equipment as we do when he goes
to the mountain, just the materials are different,” she said. “And
we are still killing each other, so maybe there hasn’t been so much
evolution after all.”
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
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