Otzi The Iceman's Last Meal Reveals 5000 Year Old Dietary Habits

In 1991, German tourists discovered, in the Eastern Italian Alps, a human body that was later determined to be the oldest naturally preserved ice mummy, known as Otzi or the Iceman. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on July 12 who have conducted the first in-depth analysis of the Iceman’s stomach contents offer a rare glimpse of our ancestor’s ancient dietary habits. Among other things, their findings show that the Iceman’s last meal was heavy on the fat.

The findings offer important insights into the nutritional habits of European individuals, going back more than 5,000 years to the Copper Age. They also offer clues as to how our ancient ancestors handled food preparation.

This photograph was taken during the stomach content sampling campaign in November 2010 in Bolzano, Italy.

Credit: South Tyrol Archaeology MuseumEuracM.Samadelli

“By using a complementary multi-omics approach combined with microscopy, we reconstructed the Iceman’s last meal, showing that he has had a remarkably high proportion of fat in his diet, supplemented with wild meat from ibex and red deer, cereals from einkorn, and with traces of toxic bracken,” says Frank Maixner of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. Bracken is a genus of large ferns.

Maixner and colleagues, including Albert Zink, explains that the analysis hadn’t happened earlier because scientists were initially unable to identify the Iceman’s stomach. That’s because it had moved up during the mummification process. In 2009, his stomach was spotted during a re-investigation of CT scans, and an effort to analyze its contents was launched.

“The stomach material was, compared to previously analyzed lower intestine samples, extraordinarily well preserved, and it also contained large amounts of unique biomolecules such as lipids, which opened new methodological opportunities to address our questions about Otzi’s diet,” Maixner says.

This figure shows the Iceman’s gastrointestinal (GI) tract preservation and content texture. The radiographic image shows the completely filled stomach (asterisk) and the intestinal loops of the lower GI tract (arrows). Content samples of the stomach (left, asterisk) and of two different sites in the lower GI tract (middle, right) that were re-hydrated in phosphate buffer are shown below the radiographic image.

Credit:  Institute for Mummy StudiesEurac ResearchFrank Maixner

This image shows wo large bundles of muscle fibers. Confocal laser scanning microscopy image. The scale bar indicates 1mm. Magnified image of one muscle fibre bundle. The scale bar indicates 20μm. The long cylindrical unbranched muscle cells often appear in bundles and still display striated fiber structures running perpendicular to the long fiber axis characteristic for cardiac and skeletal muscle tissue.

Credit:  Institute for Mummy StudiesEurac ResearchFrank Maixner