Iceman had bad teeth

The Iceman named Ötzi who was discovered in the Alps in 1991 had bad teeth, say Swiss scientists in the latest examination of this 5300-year-old mummy. Visual examination and CT scans revealed evidence of periodontitis, tooth decay and accidental damage, according to Frank Rühli and colleagues writing in the European Journal of Oral Sciences. The observations are consistent with a diet of starchy foods such as bread and cereal porridge which natives were eating at the time due to the rise of agriculture.

These findings are helping to create a broad picture of the lifestyle of Ötzi. In 2012, scientists in Germany published news of a mass spectrometric analysis of the keratins in his fur clothing to reveal that he wore leggings of goat and red deer fur. The report in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry also described how his other clothing contained fur scraps from sheep, goat, cattle, red deer, chamois and a canid such as wolf or dog. In another report published in 2012, Raman spectroscopy was used to locate intact red blood cells in Ötzi's wounds.

The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, opened a public exhibition in 2013 dedicated to Ötzi, which features the mummy on display in a climate-controlled, darkened room.