"Ötzi the Iceman is more of a snowman" Topic

"Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old ice mummy found by hikers in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, is one of the oldest and best preserved mummies in the world. Much of his soft tissue, including his tattooed skin, survived, as did his clothing, quiver of arrows and other equipment, some of it damaged. Since his discovery, the prevailing theory explaining this exceptional state of preservation is that after a violent conflict, Ötzi fled to what is now the Tisenjoch Pass in the fall and froze to death in the gully where his remains were soon covered with glacier ice. In the deep freeze, the man and his belongings, damaged in the conflict before his flight, were preserved until they emerged from the thawing ice in 1991.

A new study published in the journal The Holocene by an international team of scientists has found the prevailing theory is wrong on pretty much all counts: Ötzi didn't die where he was found; it wasn't autumn; he was not quickly covered in ice nor did he stay frozen under a glacier the whole time; his equipment was not damaged before he died, but rather by natural activity in the millennia since. The study examined data recovered from other glacial archaeological sites, analyses of the finds assemblage and radiocarbon dates from the Alpine gully to investigate Ötzi's archaeological context…"

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