New DNA analysis has revealed that Oetzi, the 5,300-year-old mummy discovered in a melting glacier in the Italian Alps 25 years ago, harbored a pathogen in his stomach when he was murdered. The bug,
Helicobacter pylori
, is common and gives people gastritis and stomach ulcers. In order to make the discovery, scientists completely defrosted the mummy and took samples of its stomach.
Eduard Egarter-Vigl and Albert Zink take a sample from the completely defrosted Iceman mummy in November 2010.
Researchers extract the DNA of the Iceman's stomach contents at the lab of the European Academy(EURAC) in north Italy's Bozen/Bolzano.
This detail of X-ray imaging reveals the Iceman's stomach and intestine.
This chart shows the concentrations of the
Helicobacter pylori
pathogen in the Iceman's stomach and intestine and the site of the muscle control sample. Further analysis showed that the train of
Helicobacter pylori
the Iceman harbored was a representative of the bacterial population of Asian origin that existed in Europe before hybridization. "This puts things into wonderful perspective for us with just one genome. We can say the waves of migrations that brought the African strain into Europe had not occurred, or had not occurred in earnest, by the time the Iceman was alive," Yoshan Moodley, at the University of Venda, South Africa, explained.