THE BODY

On September 19, 1991, Ötzi (the name given him by scientists) 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.

So archaeologists were not immediately consulted, and Ötzi remained frozen on the mountain for four more days, his upper body protruding from a glacier. The lag allowed curious onlookers to poke around, including one member of the Alpine Rescue Service, who inadvertently damaged the left hip and buttock with a pneumatic hammer, trying to dig the corpse from the ground.

As Ötzi's body began to thaw from its icy grave, it became apparent that this was no modern European. About 5 feet, 4 inches tall and dressed in three layers of furs and grass clothes, he wore well-lined shoes, a belt from which to drape his loincloth and suspend his leggings, a jacket, a cape and a bearskin hat.

Today, Ötzi resides in a cold-storage vault in the Archaeological Museum of Bolzano in Italy. The vault temperature remains at a constant - 6 C, with a relative humidity of 96 to 98 percent. For investigational purposes the body is removed from storage and put in a laminar flow box for no longer than 11 minutes at a time.

Otzi's mumification was so complete and happened so rapidly (experts think he froze and was encased in a glacier soon after death ) that even his internal organs remain intact. In fact, scientists have been able to examine his stomach contents and intestines to learn about diet in the Neolithic period. They even know what he ate for his last meal!

When they found pollen inside his colon, scientists speculated that Otzi had died in late summer, perhaps in an early snowstorm. But University of Innsbruck archaeobotanist Klaus Oeggl reconstructed his last meal from microscopic analysis of a sample taken from his transverse colon. The sample contained pollen varieties that would have landed on Otzi's food or water, or were inhaled and trapped in his saliva. It proved that Otzi must have died in spring or early summer.

Most of the pollen came from the hop-hornbeam tree blooms between March and June. Sperm in the pollen grain usually decays after exposure to air or water, but it was still intact. Thus it was absorbed soon after leaving the tree, and the nearest stands of hop-hornbeam trees would have grown in a valley to the south, some six hours away by foot.

Oeggl believes that only eight hours before he died, Otzi was to the south in what is now Italy's Schnals Balley, eating his last meal: unleavened einkorn wheat bread, an herb or another green plant, and meat.

Because einkorn doesn't grow naturally in Europe, finding it in Otzi's intestinal tract suggests contact with an agricultural community. The wheat was probably finely ground into meal and made into bread rather than eaten as a porridge, in which case the grains would have been eaten whole and found in larger pieces in the colon.

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