MS analysis of 5300-year-old clothing sheds light on its wearer's lifestyle. In 1991, two German tourists hiking in the Otzal Alps near the border of Italy and Austria stumbled across a frozen corpse, which was partially encased in ice. Initially, the mummified remains were thought to belong to a modern man, perhaps a hiker who had succumbed to the harsh conditions atop the glacier. But later studies revealed that the corpse was much, much older--5300 years older, to be exact. And thus began the mystery of Europe's oldest natural mummy, "Otzi" the iceman. Who was Otzi? What was his life like? Why was he on the mountain? How did he die? Because Otzi was not formally buried and is so well preserved, many clues that might help answer these questions were recovered with his body. "He's the best mummy preserved from those ages," says Klaus Hollemeyer of Saarland University (Germany). "He died with all his accoutrements around him. He had his everyday clothes, his hunting equipment, his flint stone, and his axe--everything a man from those ages needed for everyday life." Hollemeyer and colleagues at GENE-FACTS and the Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (both in Germany) are the latest to address questions about Otzi's life, with a new study in which they use MS methods to analyze hairs from the clothing the iceman wore (Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom. 2008, 22, 2751-2767).
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