An arrowhead found in his upper chest had been fired from behind, fatally severing an artery, but the shaft had been removed, suggesting the killer had stood over the dying man.

Ötzi was found in 1991, just inside Italy’s border with Austria, and now resides at the Bolzano Museum, where from time to time this oldest intact human corpse is subjected to sophisticated medical examinations. These have already established where he came from and of what his last meal consisted: he was thought to have taken it while attempting a perilous crossing of the Tisenjoch pass (The Times, October 24, 1994).

The studies, reported in last month’s National Geographic by Stephen Hall, now suggest that he was murdered in what Mr. Hall calls "a riveting scene of Neolithic noir". “We do not know if his enemies caught up with him or were waiting there in ambush: what we do know is that he never left that hollow alive,” he says.

The stone arrowhead was found on an X-ray in 2001, and two years ago, when Ötzi was put through a CT scanner, it was discovered that it had severed the left subclavian artery, which carried blood from the heart to the left arm, a lethal wound. The angle of the wound suggested that the arrow was fired from behind and below, through the shoulder-blade — the shot used by Palaeolithic hunters to bring down large game such as reindeer.

The arrow shaft was nowhere to be found, even though Ötzi’s equipment, including a valuable bronze axe, was scattered around him. Dr. Eduard Egarter Vigl, a pathologist in Bolzano who has worked with the body, suggested in the German magazine Germania in May that the killer had removed it to cover his tracks, since arrows can be identified almost as easily as a bullet can be linked to a gun.

This suggests that the killer was known to his victim, and the murder may have been part of an internecine dispute: but it seems clear in any case that the original theories of death by exposure are no longer tenable. “Above all, this tale of an enigmatic and bloody death atop a desolate alpine ridge is a story about remarkable scientific insight”, Mr Hall says.

National Geographic Vol. 212 No. 1: 68-81; www.ngm.com/0707