Who Killed The Iceman Summary

The article I read is Who Killed the Iceman? Clues Emerge in a Very Cold Case published by The New York Times on March 26th, 2017. This article is about how Detective Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police was called by the head of a small Italian museum in Bolzano, Italy. Angelika Fleckinger is the director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology and wanted help solving a cold case. The case was about an unknown victim, nicknamed Ötzi, who has been in cold storage for a quarter-century. Ötzi is often called the Iceman as he is the worlds most perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper Age man who had been frozen inside a glacier along the Northern Italy 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 after the Iceman was found. An x-ray showed that the mummy was shot in the back by an arrow, right under his shoulder. With the help of scientific research, scientists have been able to put together a very detailed picture of what happened to Ötzi on the day he died, around 3300 B.C..

The article mentioned that there are a few mummies around the world who are as well preserved like Ötzi. The glacier that froze Ötzi kept his organs and skin largely intact, which helped scientist even more.

Forensic science is a key to help solve every modern murder case. But because Ötzi was over 5000 years old, scientists required the help of high tech techniques involving specialties like archeobotany and paleometallurgy. Scientist were able to recognize Ötzi as a 5 foot 5-inch man (which was the average height for this time), who weighed 110 pounds, had brown eyes and shoulder length, dark brown hair, and had a size 7 ½ foot size. He was about 45 years old which was reasonably old for the time period he lived in. Ötzi had the physique of a man who did a lot of walking, but his hands show that he was not a manual laborer. He barely had any fat on his body and had all of his teeth, but in between his two upper front teeth was a 3-mm gap, an inherited condition called Diastema. Scientists were able to find traces of pollen

in his digestive tract, so scientists were able to place his time of death sometime around spring and summer. In Ötzi’s last 2 days, he had 3 distinctive meals and walked from an elevation of about 6,500 feet, down to the valley floor and then up to the mountains again, where his body was founds, 10,500 feet up. His body had one prominent wound, other than the one that killed him. It was a deep cut in his right hand between the thump and forefinger, down to the bone and potentially disabling. Due to the healing of the wound, it was about two days old. Roughly half and hour before his death, Ötzi was having a proper meal which scientist found was recently cooked. After his last meal, the killer came and shot the arrow about 100 feet away from Ötzi. The arrow went under his left armpit and ripped through a half-inch section of Ötzi’s subclavian artery, a wound that is quickly fatal and not treatable even in present time. Forensic scientist conquered that the wound, based on the angle, had been either shot from below and behind, or Ötzi had been bent forward when he was hot from above and behind. Ötzi/s case continues to bring surprises even after all this time. Last year, scientist discovered that Ötzi was infected with an unusual strain of H. Pylori, the bacteria believed responsible for ulcers today.
This article portrays my chosen profession, which is a forensic scientist by proving that all modern and century old murder investigations relies heavily on forensic science. This article shows that in the Iceman case, Forensic scientists as well as other scientists in various fields such as archeobotany (the analysis and interpretation of plant remains found at archaeological sites) and Paleometallurgy (The study of ancient metallurgy from its beginnings up to industrial age, examining and interpreting the remains of old metal-working equipment and sites) use modern technology to figure out how long Ötzi has been deceased for, how old he was, how tall he was, how is physique was, what his last three meals were, how long ago he ate before he died, what time he died based off of pollen, and what infection he had, all based of his preserved remains.