Descriptions of Ötzi The Iceman

On September 19, 1991, Ötzi was found at about 10,500 feet in the Öztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy. His body was so well preserved that the hikers who found him and the first investigators assumed he had been dead for a relatively short time.

Current estimates, at the time of his death Ötzi was approximately 1.65 meters tall, weighed about 50 kilograms and was about 45 years of age. When his body was found, it weighed 38 kilograms. Because the body was covered in ice shortly after his death, it only partially deteriorated. Analysis of pollen and dust grains and the isotopic composition of his tooth enamel indicate that he spent his childhood near the present village of Feldthurns, north of Bolzano, but later went to live in valleys about 50 kilometers further north. Analysis by Franco Rollo's group at the University of Camerin has shown that Ötzi's mitochondrial DNA belongs to the K1 subcluster of the mitochondrial haplogroup K.

Analysis of Ötzi's intestinal contents showed two meals, one of chamois meat, the other of red deer meat. Both were eaten with some grain as well as some roots and fruits. The grain from both meals was highly processed einkorn wheat bran, quite possibly eaten in the form of bread. There were also a few kernels of hair analysis was used to examine his diet from several months before.

Pollen in the first meal showed that it had been consumed in a mid-altitude conifer forest, and other pollens indicated the presence of wheat and legumes, which may have been domesticated crops. Also, pollen grains of hop-hornbeam were discovered. The pollen was very well preserved, with even the cells inside still intact, indicating that it had been fresh at the time of Ötzi's death, which places the event in the spring.

High levels of both copper particles and arsenic were found in Ötzi's hair. This, along with Ötzi's copper axe which is 99.7% pure copper, has led scientists to speculate that Ötzi was involved in copper smelting.

The body was taken then taken to Austria where scientists soon got to research on him. Then scientist decided to analyze the density of his bone to find out how old he was and they also examined his preserved belongings such as his copper axe. The cause of his death is still remains as a mystery. Now forensic scientists joined the Austrian archaeologists to investigate this unique case and new research has revealed a shocking answer.


DNA

Scientist had recovered some fungal material from Ötzi’s clothing and its DNA was consequently sequenced. In addition to that, some of Ötzi’s intestinal contents were also analyzed for macrofossils as well as its DNA. Plants’ and animals’ DNA were also recovered from both of his small and large intestines. Therefore, in cases like this, biologists or the scientist often obtain DNAs that they roughly know very little about. To learn more about this unknown sequence, one of the first steps that the biologist did to examine the DNA was to use a bio-informatics program such as the BLAST . BLAST stands for Basic Local Alignment Search Tools and it is used to to search the databases for similar sequences which is already known.

BLAST compares a given sequence to all sequences in a specified database in a pair-wise fashion. Each comparison is given a score, reflecting the degree of similarity between the query sequence and the sequence being compared. Discriminating between real and random matches is done by estimating the probability that the match might occur by chance. The significance of each alignment is computed as an E value, a statistical measure of significance. The e-value represents the probability that this match would have arisen by random chance in this database. For that reason, for any given search, the smaller the e- value, the better the match between sequences.