A final blow to the head, not an arrow wound, killed Ötzi, the 5,000-year-old Iceman found in the Italian Alps, says a new study on the world's oldest and best-preserved mummy.
Presented at the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy in Bolzano, a new research center launched in July, the study re-examines forensic data, various CT scans, and focuses on the unnatural position in which the mummy was found.
"The Iceman's body doesn’t only feature the already known arrowhead wound on the shoulder and wounds on the hand. There is also a traumatic cerebral lesion caused by a frontal attack," the academy said in a statement. Found in Ötzi's left shoulder in 2001, the stone arrowhead was thought to have caused the prehistoric man’s death, fatally severing his left subclavian artery. Now a team of researchers which include prehistory professor Andreas Lippert from the University of Vienna, radiologists Paul Gostner and Patrizia Pernter from the Bolzano regional hospital, and Eduard Egarter Vigl, Ötzi's official caretaker at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, have reopened the debate.
They believe that blood loss from the arrow wound would have only made Ötzi lose consciousness. According to the researchers, death came from a violent blow to the head. Either the man’s killer gave Ötzi the final whack, possibly by hitting him with a stone, or he could have fallen over backward and hit his head on a rock.
Whatever the scenario, "death was caused by a cerebral trauma," the researchers concluded. Egarter and colleagues believe they have also solved another long-standing mystery: Ötzi’s unnatural posture in death. When the Iceman was found by accident in 1991 in a melting glacier in the Ötztal Alps — hence the Ötzi name — his frozen body was face down, with the left arm bent across the chest. It was thought that the position of the left arm was due to Ötzi’s effort to stop the hemorrhage or the acute pain.
by www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk
Presented at the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy in Bolzano, a new research center launched in July, the study re-examines forensic data, various CT scans, and focuses on the unnatural position in which the mummy was found.
"The Iceman's body doesn’t only feature the already known arrowhead wound on the shoulder and wounds on the hand. There is also a traumatic cerebral lesion caused by a frontal attack," the academy said in a statement. Found in Ötzi's left shoulder in 2001, the stone arrowhead was thought to have caused the prehistoric man’s death, fatally severing his left subclavian artery. Now a team of researchers which include prehistory professor Andreas Lippert from the University of Vienna, radiologists Paul Gostner and Patrizia Pernter from the Bolzano regional hospital, and Eduard Egarter Vigl, Ötzi's official caretaker at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, have reopened the debate.
They believe that blood loss from the arrow wound would have only made Ötzi lose consciousness. According to the researchers, death came from a violent blow to the head. Either the man’s killer gave Ötzi the final whack, possibly by hitting him with a stone, or he could have fallen over backward and hit his head on a rock.
Whatever the scenario, "death was caused by a cerebral trauma," the researchers concluded. Egarter and colleagues believe they have also solved another long-standing mystery: Ötzi’s unnatural posture in death. When the Iceman was found by accident in 1991 in a melting glacier in the Ötztal Alps — hence the Ötzi name — his frozen body was face down, with the left arm bent across the chest. It was thought that the position of the left arm was due to Ötzi’s effort to stop the hemorrhage or the acute pain.
by www.thesupernaturalworld.co.uk
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