Frozen dinners

Natural History, March, 2003 by Stephan Reebs

One September afternoon a dozen years ago, two hikers came across a mummified man at the edge of an alpine glacier in northern Italy. Now known as the Tyrolean Iceman, or Otzi (after the Otzar Alps, where he was discovered), the 5,200-year-old corpse has been the subject of much analysis and discussion, including conflicting assertions about his diet.

Now, adding to earlier investigations into Otzi's diet, the molecular anthropologist Franco Rollo and his colleagues, all of the University of Camerino in Italy, have extracted intact DNA fragments from the mummy's intestinal contents and compared the DNA with known sequences from modern plants and animals. Their analysis shows that Otzi's second-to-last meat (the remains lower down in the intestinal tract) included the meat of an ibex (a wild goat), cereals (grains of the grass family, possibly cultivated), and various other plants. His last meal was red deer meat.

Today the red deer (Cervus elaphus) is at the periphery of human affairs. Five thousand years ago, however, Europeans relied heavily on the animal. Carvings depicting red deer occur prominently at Neolithic alpine archaeological sites. Some of the equipment Otzi carried (a curved spike, an edge sharpener for stone tools, a quiver) was made from the red deer's skin or antlers. And some historians maintain that people deforested Europe during the Mesolithic period to favor the growth of red deer herds. The creature is thus thought to have been on early continental menus--an inference that Rollo and his colleagues have now directly confirmed. ("Otzi's last meals: DNA analysis of the intestinal content of the Neolithic glacier mummy from the Alps," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99:12594-99, October 1, 2002)