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Ötzi the Ice Man filled his fat belly before embarking on the unfortunate hunting trip that ended with his bloody death on a glacier in the Eastern Alps 5,300 years ago , scientists say.
Analysis of the contents of the hunter's stomach reveals that half of his last meal was made up of animal fat, mainly from a species of wild goat known as Alpine ibex
. his final holiday was delayed because they could not find his stomach. He was finally located by a CT scan, rolled up under his ribcage near his narrowed lungs.
"It was surprising to see this diet extraordinarily high in fat," said Frank Maixner at the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano. Italy. "He clearly knew that fat is a source of high energy and he really composed his diet to survive at high altitude."
The last meal of Ötzi fortified for a hunting trip that lasted several days in the Alps, but it may not have been the most enjoyable feast. Maixner tried the ibex. He said that the meat is not too bad, but struggled to find the words to encapsulate the experience of eating subcutaneous fat from the animal. "The taste is really, well, it's horrible," he said. "And they had no salt at the time."
German tourists discovered the corpse of the copper age in 1991 while they were hiking at 3,200 meters in the Ötztal Alps, near the Austro-Hungarian border. Italian. They thought that the body, soon nicknamed Ötzi, was that of a modern mountaineer, but during the excavations, the well-preserved remains were more than 5000 years old. The hunter, who was believed to be 45 years old at his death, was wearing a woven turf coat and was wearing leggings and leather shoes. He was covered with simple tattoos and carried a copper ax, a knife and flint-pointed arrows.
The Ötzi body is stored at -6 ° C to ensure that the remains do not deteriorate. In order to analyze his stomach contents, Maixner, who is part of an international team of scientists, had to partially thaw the corpse to take samples to check the remains of his last meal.
By a combination of methods including DNA and microscopic inspections, the researchers found traces of red deer meat and ibex, ancient wheat and a lot of ibex fat. They also discovered multiple traces of toxic ferns, a finding that surprised scientists.
In the journal Current Biology, researchers speculate that Ötzi may have eaten poisonous fern to get rid of whipworm parasites that had previously been found in his intestines. But Maixner favors other explanations. Ötzi may have eaten fern as a dietary supplement, a practice known to some Aboriginal groups. "Another possibility is that he wrapped his dried meat in fern leaves and some of the material entered his gut involuntarily," Maixner said.
However, it happened, the poisonous plant was not fatal. The discovery in 2001 that an arrowhead had broken the Ötzi shoulder blade suggests that events became dark on the mountain that day. "The current thought is that he bled and died on the glacier," said Maixner.
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