Cracking a Very Cold Case: the Killing of Ötzi the Iceman

Twenty years after hikers stumbled upon Ötzi the Iceman’s 5,300-year-old body poking out of a glacier in the Tyrolean Alps in Italy, researchers have finally located the legendary mummy’s stomach. Retired Italian radiologist Paul Gostner was reexamining body scans of Ötzi taken in 2001 and 2005 when he noticed a previously unidentified organ near the mummy’s intestine. Gostner realized it was the Iceman’s stomach, shriveled beyond recognition after thousands of years on ice, and transposed with the colon, probably as a result of the body’s having lain prone over a rock for so long.