Seventeen years ago, a pair of climbers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a leathery corpse hunched in a pool of melting ice. At first they thought the body was fresh, but the copper ax, wooden bow and quiver of 14 arrows spoke of a man from another time. The iceman, affectionately dubbed Ötzi, was the oldest frozen body (5,300 years) ever found.
It would take almost a decade to crack one of the most fundamental questions about Ötzi—what did he eat? "Diet tells you something profound not just about the person and how he spent his time, but about his society and relationships," says Stephen Macko, the scientist who would become an unlikely key to deciphering Ötzi's menu.
A professor of biogeochemistry at the University of Virginia, Macko began his career leagues under the soaring Alps, analyzing isotopes at the bottom of the sea. In 1997, he and a ...
