Ötzi, the iceman – lessons from modern mummy research

Abstract

The Iceman, commonly referred to as Ötzi, is the world’s oldest glacier mummy and one of the best studied ancient human remains in the world. Since the discovery of the 5300-year-old Copper Age individual in 1991, at the Tisenjoch in the Eastern Italian Alps, a variety of morphological, radiological, and molecular analyses have been applied that revealed important insights into his ancestry, his life habits and the circumstances surrounding his violent death. In more recent research, the mummy was subjected to modern research methodologies focusing on high-throughput sequence analysis of ancient biomolecules (DNA, proteins, lipids) that are still found to be preserved in his mummified tissues. This application of innovative “-omics” technologies revealed novel insights on the ancestry, disease predisposition, diet and the presence of pathogens in the glacier mummy. In this article the most important and actual results of the molecular studies are presented.