A Messenger from the PastHis people said good-bye and watched him walk off toward the moun

A Messenger from the Past

His people said good-bye and watched him walk off toward the mountains. They had little reason to fear for his safety: the man was well dressed in insulated clothing and equipped with tools needed to survive the Alpine climate. However, as weeks passed without his return, they must have grown worried, then anxious, and finally resigned, After many years everyone who knew him had died, and a note even a memory of the man remained.

Then, on an improbably distant day, he came down from the mountain. Things had changed a bit: it wasn't the Bronze Age anymore, and he was a celebrity.

When a melting glacier released its hold on a 4,000-year-old corpse in September, it was quite rightly called one of the most important archeological finds of the century. Discovered by a German couple hiking at 10,500 feet in the Italian Tyrol near the Austrian border, the partially freeze-dried body still wore remnants of leather garments and boots that had been stuffed with straw for insulation. The hikers alerted scientists from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, whose more complete examination revealed that the man was tattooed on his back and behind his knee. At his side was a bronze ax of a type typical in southern central Europe around 2000 B C. On his expedition--perhaps to hunt or to search for metal ore--he had also carded an all-purpose stone knife, a wooden backpack, a bow and a quiver, a small bag containing a flint lighter and kindling, and an arrow repair kit in a leather pouch.

Such everyday gear gives an unprecedented perspective on life in early Bronze Age Europe. "The most exciting thing is that we genuinely appear to be looking at a man who had some kind of accident in the course of a perfectly ordinary trip," says archeologist Ian Kinnes of the British Museum. "These are not artifacts placed in a grave, but the fellow's own possessions."

Unlike the Egyptians and Mesopotamians of the time, who had more advanced civilizations with cities and central authority, the Ice Man and his countrymen lived in a society built around small, stable villages. He probably spoke in a tongue ancestral to current European languages. Furthermore, though he was a member of a farming culture, he may well have been hunting when he died, to add meat to his family's diet. X-rays of the quiver showed that it contained 14 arrows. While his backpack was empty, careful exploration of the trench where he died revealed remnants of animal skin and bones at the same spot where the pack lay. There was also the remainder of a pile of berries. Clearly the man didn't starve to death.

A The trench provided him so with shelter from the elements, and he also had a braided mat of grass to keep him warm. B If injury or illness caused the Ice Man's death, an autopsy on the 4,000-year-old victim could turn up some clues. C The circumstances of his death may have preserved such evidence, as well as other details of his life. D Freeze-dried by the frigid climate, his inner organs and other soft tissues are much better preserved than those of dried-up Egyptian mummies or the waterlogged Scandinavian "Bog Men" found in recent years.

One concern, voiced by archeologist Colin Renfrew of Cambridge University, is that the hot TV lights that greeted the hunter's return to civilizetion may have damaged these fragile tissues, jeopardizing a chance to recover additional precious genetic information from his chromosomes. If not, Renfrew says, "it may be possible to get very long DNA sequences out of this material. This is far and away the most exciting aspect of the discovery."

For the time being, all biological research has literally 68 been put on ice at the University of Innsbruck while an in ternational team of experts, led by researcher Konrad Spindler, puzzlees out a way to thaw the body without destroying it. As sensational as it so

A．tell the readers a true story about the Ice Man and his family.

B．tell the readers about the cause of the Ice Man's death.

C．provide some information about the life 4,000 years ago.

D．introduce some background to the Ice Man in a vivid way.