The Iceman Defrosted

COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS

Ötzi the Iceman has been ‘reincarnated’ by palaeontological artists Alfons and Adrie Kennis using forensic findings as well as artistic inspiration.

ANTHROPOLOGY The Iceman defrosted Marta Paterlini reports on an exhibition marking 20 years since Ötzi, one of the world’s oldest natural mummies, was discovered under the Alpine ice.

s dead celebrities go, Ötzi the Ötzi20: Life, Neanderthal man. The “What I found peculiar was the small Iceman must be one of the most Science, Fiction, artists reconstructed nasal cavities,” says Adrie. This trait, along closely studied — he has been meas- Reality Ötzi’s body by compar- with his fine bones, means that Ötzi would Aured, X-rayed and dated. But the 5,300-year- South Tyrol Museum of ing his bone measure- have looked fragile, he adds. The artists Archaeology, Bolzano, old mummified corpse, found part-buried in Italy. ments, such as femur also think that he would have appeared ice on the Tisenjoch Pass in the Alps span- Until 15 January 2012. length, to those of men older than someone in their mid-forties ning the Italian–Austrian border in 1991, today. They sculpted today, because his features would have been still holds surprises. Many of his secrets are muscles from modelling clay, attaching them ravaged by greater exposure to the harsher, revealed in Ötzi20, a major exhibition that to an appropriately sized skeleton. Using a hotter climate of the time. opened this week at the South Tyrol Museum polyurethane mould, they crafted a silicone The reconstruction team had many dis- of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, to mark the torso, adding legs in resin and plastic. The cussions about the precise moment at which 20th anniversary of his discovery. model is finished with five thin layers of sili- to depict him. “We agreed to stage it a day

Wounded by an arrowhead in his left cone ‘skin’, each painted individually. before his death, when he is wandering up ENGLE-21LUX SOUTH TYROL MUS. OF ARCHAEOLOGY/H. shoulder, Ötzi is thought to have frozen The skull was made using accurate three- to the mountains, a spark of stress on his to death while fleeing attackers. Much of dimensional computerized tomography face,” Adrie explains. Ötzi would have been the analysis so far has concentrated on the scans of Ötzi’s head as a guide. Ultrasound uncomfortable — he was wounded and belongings found with him, but this has measurements of skull morphology and on his own, perhaps being followed. This shifted. “So far the attention has been on average skin and flesh thickness were used sombre picture contrasts with his smiling Ötzi’s clothes and tools. Now, the physical as the basis for modelling his facial tissues face in the museum’s earlier model. body becomes the focus,” explains museum — a technique used in forensic medicine to Even more striking is the colour of Ötzi’s director Angelika Fleckinger. reveal injuries. Together with traces of some eyes: not blue, as in the Central to the exhibition is a new recon- mummified characteristics, “all these data NATURE.COM previous portrayal, but struction of his body by twin brothers gave us an estimate of his portrait, complete King Tutankhamun’s brown. This derives Alfons and Adrie Kennis, Dutch palaeonto- with wrinkles, hair and eyelashes,” explains death explained? from the first analysis logical artists who previously put a face to Adrie Kennis. go.nature.com/x7evh9 of the mummy’s DNA,

34 | NATURE | VOL 471 | 3 MARCH 2011 © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT Q&A Manolis Papagrigorakis Facing the past The Athens-based orthodontist explains the art and science of

reconstructing the heads of long-dead people from their skulls alone, M. J. PAPAGRIGORAKIS including that of Myrtis — a young girl from more than 2,000 years ago, whose recreated face is our first glimpse of an ordinary ancient Greek.

Why did you decide to reconstruct an and I saw something I hadn’t seen in the ancient Greek face? other skulls unearthed from the mass grave For 30 years I have been combining my — its jaw bore both permanent teeth and science, which deals in the bone struc- part of its deciduous (baby) dentition. The ture of the lower face, with my hobbies of morphology of the front part of the lower history and art, by studying the craniofacial jaw and brow ridge, as well as the size of complex of ancient Greeks. When Myrtis’s the lower canine teeth, told us the sex. We unusually intact skull was discovered, I saw deduced her age using X-rays to look at it as a great opportunity to reveal what an how complete the roots of her teeth were. ancient Greek layperson looked like for the This suggested that the skull belonged to first time. an 11-year-old girl, to whom we gave the old Greek name Myrtis, meaning myrtle. How did you feel when you first saw the finished picture of Myrtis? How did you reconstruct her face? It was very emotional to come face to face We placed numerous markers on her skull with someone who could have been your to reflect the average tissue depth across extracted from a sample of pelvis bone. 80 times great-grandmother and at the the face, according to data tabulated for When the mummy was defrosted in same time your granddaughter, because people of various ages and of each gender. November 2010 for the first time since she really resembles today’s The Swedish sculptor Oscar its discovery, researchers found that the children. Our detailed Nilsson formed 20 anatom- stomach was filled with matter (previous reconstruction was pub- ically correct muscles using analyses had been limited to the intestine). lished in the January 2011 clay, and worked from the Using histological, morphological, DNA and issue of The Angle Ortho- skull outwards until the botanical analysis, they aim to determine dontist. tissue depth reached the which bacteria Ötzi was carrying at the time markers. He gave her brown

of his death — information they hope will Where were Myrtis’s bones eyes, taking her Greek O. PANAGIOTOU/EPA/CORBIS improve their conservation strategy and hint found? origin into account. The at his dietary habits. The building of the Athens hairstyle and expression Aside from his recent thaw, Ötzi is usually Metro in 1994–95 brought were decided after studying kept at –6 °C and 98% air humidity, and is to light a mass grave in what sculptures and depictions of misted with water once a month. The drop- was once the public cem- children living at the same lets freeze on the surface of the body, pre- etery of ancient Athens. time as Myrtis. serving it in a thin shell of ice. The crystals Archaeologists found at on his skin are visualized in an installation by least 150 skeletons, appar- Which features are the British artist Marilène Oliver, also on display ently hastily buried. The site Myrtis was rebuilt from a skull. hardest to recreate? in the exhibition. In Ötzi: Frozen, Scanned was dated to 430–426 bc, The weak points are the and Plotted (2007), Oliver converted a com- when Athens was besieged by the Spar- ears, the tip of the nose and lips, where puterized tomography scan of the frozen tans during the Peloponnesian War and an there is no bone — only soft tissues and body into an image by drilling some 50,000 unknown epidemic struck the city. cartilage that have disappeared. I used holes into 80 acrylic sheets that were then her dental arch to define the shape and stacked into a translucent three-dimensional How did you become involved in the position of her lips, and here my special- block. The result is a ghostly impression of reconstruction? ity helps. The coexistence of her adult and Ötzi’s form. The archaeologists asked me to examine baby teeth create the look of an overjet, Ötzi20 embraces the full spectrum of the various bones, which we knew came from where the top teeth project forwards. Iceman’s discovery, his life and the media cir- victims of the mysterious disease. Within cus and scientific sleuthing that has followed. the tooth pulp of three different skulls, What would her life have been like? With plans to update exhibits throughout we found genes that matched those from We only know that she lived around 430 bc, the year, the show provides a focus for the a bacterium called Salmonella enterica when many of the values that sustain con- new scientific findings that are contributing serovar Typhi, suggesting that the victims temporary civilization were established. to the emerging picture of Ötzi. ■ died of typhoid fever. She probably witnessed the building of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. Marta Paterlini is a writer based in Stockholm. What drew you to Myrtis’s remains? e-mail: [email protected] One skull was small, belonging to a child, INTERVIEW BY ALISON MCCOOK