A 5,000-year-old murder mystery

Solving a 5,000-year-old murder - in perhaps the coldest of cold cases, Ötzi, a Neolithic Iceman who was murdered more than 5,000 years ago.
Discovered in the Alps almost twenty years ago by two hikers, Ötzi has been subjected to a deep study by archaeologists who used X-rays, CT scans, and a slew of other forensic techniques to piece together the 33 hours before the Iceman faced his killer.

From Cosmos:

"The unique thing about this find is that a man has been preserved in full dress with all his equipment," says Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where Ötzi resides today. It's not only the Iceman's age, but the 'wet' nature of the mummification process that makes him so scientifically valuable, she adds. "The tissue is therefore elastic; a lucky circumstance, as some scientific examinations would otherwise have been impossible."

"Ötzi is much older than any other glacier mummy and is a very rare case in which mummification took place by dehydration before the body became embedded in glacier ice," say researchers led by Klaus Oeggl of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

"Even the food residue in his digestive tract was very well preserved, and a test sample provided evidence of his diet, environment, and season of death."

Oeggl's team have used the remains of Ötzi's last meals (including ibex, grains and red deer meat) and tiny traces of different pollens, to reveal his whereabouts over his last 33 hours with surprising clarity.

"Ötzi's movements in his last days from sub-alpine regions down to the valley bottoms and then up to alpine regions again, as well as his lethal injury by an arrowhead, confirm that Ötzi's last days were hectic and violent...

"Who killed the iceman?"