text: Credit: (left) UZH; (right) 120/Creative Commons 
   
   Europe's best-known mummy wasn't just a medical mess; he also had terrible teeth, according to a new study. Ötzi (inset photo), a Stone Age man who died atop a glacier about 5300 years ago, suffered from severe gum disease and cavities. His teeth, back and front, were also heavily worn from chewing coarse grain and use as a "third hand" for gripping tools and cutting. When Ötzi was discovered atop a glacier on the Austro-Italian border, his frozen corpse was intensively studied. But no one took a close look at his teeth until now. Using 3D computer tomography (a CAT scan), the hunter's mouth could be examined for clues as to the life he led. The results, published this week in the European Journal of Oral Sciences, suggest that Ötzi didn't have it easy. A fall or other accident killed one of his front teeth, still discolored millennia later. And he may have had a small stone, gone unnoticed in his whole-grain bread or gruel, to thank for a broken molar. That gruel may be the culprit behind Ötzi's cavities and gum disease, too. (An arrow on the right in CAT scan above marks places where the bone is eaten away by infection, the left arrow points at deep cavities.) In the late Stone Age, humans were increasingly incorporating coarsely ground grain into their diets. The uptick in starches, the researchers suggest, could explain the increasing frequency of cavities in teeth from the time—a problem that's been with us ever since. 
   
   
   
   See more ScienceShots. ||||| Few of our ancestors have been so thoroughly poked and prodded as Neolithic Tyrolean Iceman "Ötzi," discovered melting out of an Alpine glacier in 1991. Researchers have probed his stomach and bowels for traces of his last meal and analyzed his teeth for cavities. Now, an international team has sequenced his entire genome, and it turns out Ötzi still has some surprises in store. 
   
   Earlier computer scans had revealed Ötzi's severe arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. But the new analysis shows that Ötzi had a genetic predisposition to the condition, despite the fact that as a hunter-gatherer he had none of what are currently believed to be the relevant risk factors, such as being overweight, getting too little exercise, and smoking or drinking. "This new data suggests that we might be less able to prevent arteriosclerosis than we believed," notes cardiologist and mummy expert Gregory Thomas of the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the new work. 
   
   The whole genome sequencing also reveals more about Ötzi's ancestors. Earlier research analyzed Ötzi's mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through only the female line, but had found few known matches among modern populations. Now sequencing of his Y chromosome places him in the rare G2A4 haplogroup, meaning that his paternal genes are linked to a population that left the Near East for Europe at the beginning of the Neolithic era, roughly 1000 years before Ötzi himself lived. 
   
   Ötzi's genetic profile marks him as being most closely related to small populations currently living in the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, as well as some of the more remote areas of Georgia and Russia, says geneticist Angela Graefen of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, Italy, one of the principal researchers on the paper. That doesn't mean that Ötzi was Sardinian or Corsican, Graefen notes, but that those populations may be the closest living genetic matches to the hunter-gatherers who originally migrated into Europe. 
   
   The genome analysis, published this week in Nature Communications, also helps flesh out our picture of Ötzi the man: Researchers now know he had brown eyes, brown hair, type-O blood, and shared the lactose intolerance that was then still the norm among Neolithic Europeans. He was also the first known carrier of Lyme disease: the sequencing yielded genes from the disease-causing Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium. Although scientists can't know whether Lyme disease actually made Ötzi sick during his lifetime, the discovery of 60% of a B. burgdorferi genome from a Neolithic carrier shows that this pathogen has plagued humans for thousands of years. Until researchers compare the B. burgdorferi genome from Ötzi with more modern incarnations of the pathogen, they won't have a clear picture of how Lyme disease evolves. "But depending on the research other scientists are doing over the next few years, we could be gaining a lot more insights from Ötzi's genome," Graefen says. 
   
   The new paper adds to our knowledge of Neolithic life, says mummy expert Frank Ruehli of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "Of course Ötzi is only one individual, but he's a very well-preserved, well-described individual, whom we have a lot of additional information about already. So this is an important step."
target: – Cavities are far from a modern woe, reveals a new study of a 5,300-year-old "ice mummy." "Ötzi" didn't just have the bad luck of dying on a glacier, he also suffered from terrible teeth, reports Science. Though his remains were discovered on the Austro-Italian border in 1991, his teeth had never been assessed. Researchers circled back to a CAT scan taken in 2005 to review his "oral cavity" and "study evolutionary aspects of oral disease," per their abstract in the European Journal of Oral Sciences. What they determined, as translated from dental-speak ("the poor periodontal condition of the Iceman's dentition, eg, loss of alveolar bone...") by Science: a discolored front tooth as the result of some sort of accident, a broken molar, cavities, and gum disease. A diet involving gruel may have been responsible for the latter two conditions. In fact, the researchers believe that the rise of starches in the diets of the time may be linked to a corresponding increase in cavities.