New research has shown that a copper axe carried by a Neolithic hunter known as Ötzi the Iceman came from southern Tuscany.
The find has surprised experts because hundreds of miles separate Tuscany from the Alpine pass where the mummified body of Ötzi was discovered 25 years ago.
It is known that copper was mined in the Alps so it is a mystery why the Iceman’s blade should have come from so far away.
Nor do scientists know whether the copper was acquired as a raw ingot, which then had to be fashioned into an axe, or as a ready-made blade.
The hunter-gatherer, nicknamed Ötzi after the Otztal mountains where he was found, died 5,300 years ago on what is now the border between Italy and Austria.
He perished after being shot in the back with an arrow by an unknown assailant, in one of the world’s oldest murder mysteries.
His body was frozen forever in the snow and ice of the mountains.
“Our results unambiguously indicate that the source of the metal is the ore-rich area of southern Tuscany, despite ample evidence that Alpine copper ore sources were known and exploited at the time,” scientists said in a report published in the research journal Plos One.
The fact that copper was being traded between central Italy and the remote Alps was “surprisingâ€, said the experts, who are from Padua University and the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, where the mummified body of the Iceman is on permanent display.
08 Jul 2017
bob sykes
Why was the scientist surprised at the trading. The distance from Tuscany to the Alps is quite short. We know that paleolithic hunter gatherers traded amber, shell shells, ocher, obsidian, native copper and other materials over thousands of miles.
Seattle Sam
Clearly they had not yet discovered the benefits of tariffs.
Surellin
Ohio flint was traded everywhere east of the Mississippi in pre-Columbian times, as was Michigan copper. Amazing.
Alipius
“He perished after being shot in the back with an arrow by an unknown assailant, in one of the world’s oldest murder mysteries.” Why ‘unknown’? And, more sensibly, why ‘assailant/murder’: William Rufus died in 1100AD from an arrow during a hunt in the New Forrest, and so had an elder brother and a cousin.
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