Autopsy on 5,200 year old Alpine man

By Gayle Young, CNN Rome bureau chief

When Alpine hikers discovered a body along a snowy ridge on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991, police thought at first they were looking at a murder victim.

The man in his mid-40s was extremely well preserved -- skin, hair and clothing largely intact.

But the body proved in fact to be that of a neolithic hunter who lived 5,200 years ago, and now scientists are performing what amounts to a belated autopsy to finally determine his cause of death.

Oetzi, named after the Oetz Valley where he was found, has been placed in a glass-sided refrigerator unit that keeps him at minus six degrees Celsius and in 98 percent humidity, closely recreating the glacial conditions that kept him well preserved for so many millennia.

VIDEO CNN's Gayle Young reports on research on the neolithic man who died more than 5,200 years ago Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

Thawed slightly on Friday morning, the world's oldest mummified body was examined by a team of international pathologists who took samples from his teeth and the tissue on his left knee.

Mark Thomas of the University of London said Oetzi's DNA structure will be compared to that of modern Europeans, in an attempt to establish his genetic lineage.

Minute minerals from his teeth will tell scientists where he likely to have grown up and spent much of his life.

Researchers have theorised that Oetzi froze to death on a hunting expedition in rugged terrain. He was wearing leather shoes padded with straw and a bearskin cap when he died.

In his wooden backpack were a copper axe, stone dagger and bow with 14 arrows, two of them broken.

Rome University's Franco Tagliaro said at a press conference in Bolzano Italy, where Oetzi resides in his own museum, that this latest round of tests should determine once and for all how the hunter met his end.

"We will examine the placement of his blood at the moment of death and in particular study lesions on the mummy, to establish with certainty whether they were made before or after his death, " said Tagliaro.

Which means that when the test results are in six months from now, officials may discover they have a murder victim on their hands after all.

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DNA from the Beginning
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