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. Ötzi is the
only ancient mummy ever found in the Alps, and his remarkably
preserved body provides important insight into health and
culture in the European Copper Age. He is also the subject of an
international murder investigation. Aided by Gostner’s find,
paleopathologist Albert Zink of the Institute for Mummies and
the Iceman at the European Academy of Bolzano, Italy, located
remnants in Ötzi’s stomach that genetic tests reveale