His body was discovered in 1991 by a group of German tourists in Val Senales. But its roots are in Sardinia. Ötzi, the ice mummy , is today the "star" of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. " He was Sardinian and, despite his healthy lifestyle, he suffered from high cholesterol , arthritis and arteriosclerosis ," says Martina Tauber, a pathologist at the Bolzano hospital , as reported by Corriere della Sera. The man of the Copper Age today lives in an exceptional "house": behind the glass plate that separates him from the visitors, in fact, there are cells and laboratories that work 24 hours a day to recreate the extraordinary conditions of the glacier that have preserved him for 5,300 years.
And the cost of maintaining the structure would be high: around 300,000 euros a year, almost 1,000 a day. But who was Ötzi? How did he live? “He was about 45 years old. From a genetic point of view, the maternal haplotype no longer exists: that rare subgroup of Homo Sapiens has become extinct,” explains Tauber. But the information on the father is different: his profile is identified in Sardinia or Corsica. And the digital reconstruction of his image gives us the "photo" of a man with Sardinian features , with brown and wavy hair , a stature that is between 50 and 60 metres.
However, there are still many mysteries about man's past . He would have died from a hemorrhage given by an arrow (again) stuck in his left shoulder. A wound on the head, a bruise on the cheekbone. «His x-ray is the same as that of any man, stomach and intestines provided important information while lungs and brain were subjected only to small biopsies. With the new technologies we will have much to be surprised by », concludes the pathologist.
(Unioneonline/vf)