How Ötzi the Iceman really got his tattoos

An off-beat experiment has poked holes in a popular assumption about Ötzi the Iceman’s tattoos.

Ötzi’s roughly 5,200-year-old body, found partly preserved and naturally mummified in the Italian Alps in 1991, includes 61 tattoos — black lines and crosses on his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and chest. A common but untested idea holds that charcoal ash was rubbed into skin incisions made with a sharp stone tool, resulting in the world’s oldest known tattoos (SN: 1/13/16).

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