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Otzi, the Stone Age man whose remains were found in a glacier in the
Alps in 1991, was fleeing his home village, and died just a few kilometres
from safety. Researchers leading the study of the 5200-year-old traveller,
came up with this version of events after discovering a settlement close
to where he died. They presented their conclusions at the European Forum
last month in Alpbach, Austria.

Three of Otzi’s ribs had been broken just before he headed into the
mountains, and he had only a little food with him, no bow and few arrows.
‘He was badly prepared for such a march,’ says Konrad Spindler of Leopold-Franzens
University in Innsbruck.

All this led the scientists to conclude that he left his home in a hurry.
‘We think he was fleeing some disaster in his home village,’ says Spindler.

Pollen in Otzi’s clothes, and the style of his axe, dagger and flint
arrow tips, show he lived in the South Tyrol and not where he died in the
high valley on what is not the border between Austria and Italy. Otzi’s
home, says Spindler, was probably the Venosta valley, 20 kilometres south
of where his body was found.

Spindler believes that Otzi was heading for a village a mere 6 kilometres
uphill from where he died. He could well have lost his way in one of the
region’s notoriously blinding fogs (This Week, 24 October 1992). The Austrians
discovered the remains of the settlement last year, above the treeline at
an altitude of 2100 metres. Artefacts on the site show the village was a
bit older than Otzi himself. It was sheltered by a rock wall, and ‘was probably
well known to the shepherds who were grazing their herds on these slopes
at least 6000 years ago,’ says Spindler.

He says Ozti was probably a shepherd, because his pack and tools were
designed to allow him to live away from home for weeks or months – if he
had had a bow and enough provisions. He says Otzi’s grass rain-cloak was
similar to those used by shepherds in the region until modern times.

Besides his leather leggings and loin cloth, and a fur cap, Otzi wore
a jacket made up of alternating vertical stripes of black and golden fur.