Let The Record Show That Ötzi Fucked

Ötzi, the 5,000-something-year-old man found frozen in the Alps, did not have an easy go of it. He was probably murdered, shot from behind with an arrow that missed his vital organs and led to heavy bleeding and a prolonged and painful death. Days before his death, he fought another person in hand-to-hand combat and gashed his right hand. The more scientists have been able to study his body, the more ailments they have unveiled. Ötzi was born without a 12th pair of ribs, and the ones he was born with were broken. He had feasted on the fat of an alpine ibex the day of his murder—a rare win for the iceman—but his intestines teemed with Helicobacter pylori bacteria, which can cause ulcers. In fact, Ötzi had carried this bacteria long enough that he probably had gastritis or an ulcer or two. (And unfortunately one scientist who has tried alpine ibex described the taste of its fat as "horrible.") Ötzi also ate a toxic plant called bracken in an attempt, some scientists suggest, to rid himself of whipworm parasites, which had laid eggs in his colon. His lungs were sooty, blackened by days spent huffing smoke from fires. The list of his ailments goes on and on: He had fleas in his clothing. He was lactose intolerant. He had horizontal grooves on his fingernails that indicate great physical stress. He had gum disease and cavities. He was predisposed to male-pattern baldness, diabetes, and obesity. And to top it all off, he had Lyme disease, too. Sucks to be an iceman!

It is darkly comic, in a way, to read about new research on Ötzi. Each new paper invariably reveals one more wretched malady. Perhaps next year we will learn that Ötzi had pimples or weird-looking knees or just a bad vibe generally. Archaeology can be a blessing and a curse for the people whose bodies persist for examination. You live on for centuries past your actual lifetime, offering valuable scientific insight into the history of our species. And also scientists get to spend thousands of dollars figuring out everything that was wrong with you and publishing it online forever.

Anyway, science recently dealt a fresh new blow to Ötzi's fragile self-image in the form of a preprint published on bioRxiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed. (Outside researchers interviewed by Science and LiveScience found the paper convincing.) Apparently the iceman had the human papillomavirus. And Ötzi didn't have just any HPV, he had HPV-16, a high-risk strain that is responsible for most HPV-related cancers.