OETZI the Iceman, the Alpine hunter whose mummified body was discovered in 1991, was an Italian who spent his entire life within 60 kilometres of the spot where he died, according to a team of international researchers.

The finding resolves a long-standing dispute over whether Oetzi was an Austrian or an Italian, even though he lived several millennia before the emergence of European nation states. The 5,200-year-old body was found by German hikers in a melting glacier in the Oetzi Valley, 100 metres inside Italy’s border with Austria.

A team led by Wolfgang Muller, head of the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University, today publishes findings in the journal Science showing that he probably came from Bressanone, in what is now Trentino-Alto Adige, on the Italian side of the Tyrol. The researchers said that analysis of Oetzi’s dental enamel, his bones, the strontium and lead in his body, and mica in his intestine, coupled with studies of water sources and soils in the surrounding regions, placed him in the Bressanone area.

He was about 40, suffered from arthritis and diarrhoea, and died when he was shot with an arrow, perhaps in a local feud. DNA analysis of his clothing and weapons showed traces of the blood of at least four other people, suggesting that he had killed or injured them before being shot in the back, and then crawling into a cranny to die.

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