Iceman shedding light on human migration

The gut microbes of the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old mummy found frozen in a European glacier in 1991, have shed new light on the history of human migration, scientists said on Thursday.

Researchers thawed the mummy of the man, also known as Oetzi, who was killed by an arrow when he was between 40 and 50 years old and hiking across the Oetztal Alps between modern-day Italy and Austria.

When they tested the contents of his stomach, they found a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori, an age-old pathogen that has evolved into different strains according to the region of the world in which it is found.