Continental trade was fraught, even 5,300 years ago

FIVE thousand years before the British middle classes flocked to “Chiantishire” to buy wine, cheese and olive oil, products from Tuscany already had a certain cachet.

Research has shown that a copper axe carried by a Neolithic hunter known as Otzi the Iceman came from southern Tuscany. The find has surprised experts, because hundreds of miles separate Tuscany from the Alpine pass where the mummified body of Otzi, who had been murdered, was found 25 years ago. It is known that copper was mined in the Alps, so it is a mystery why the Iceman’s axe came from so far away.

The hunter-gatherer died 5,300 years ago on what is now the border between Italy and Austria. He perished after being shot in the back with an arrow by an unknown assailant, in one of the world’s oldest murder mysteries.

That copper was being traded between central Italy and the remote Alps was “surprising”, said experts from Padua University and the South Tirol Museum of Archaeology, where the mummified body is on display.