Materialise (NASDAQ:MTLS), in collaboration with a team of scientists, archeologies and historians, has created the first 3D-printed replica Ötzi’s mummified body, 5000 years after he was murdered.

After Ötzi was killed — the circumstances of which are the subject of a whole different debate — his body was frozen over and covered in ice. In the harsh, frigid terrain of the Alps, his body became cryogenically mummified. As a result, when he was discovered in 1991 by a pair of hikers, the 5000-year-old body was remarkably intact. Named after the Ötztal Alps where he was found, Ötzi provides scientists a window into Stone Age life. Thanks to Ötzi, for example, we have some idea of what people ate and wore around 3,300 BCE.
We even know the medical conditions to which Ötzi and his contemporaries might have been prone. Ötzi’s hardened arteries suggest a tendency to heart disease, and the surviving parts of his digestive tract show the presence of a gut bacteria that may have caused him some kind of abdominal inflammation.

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