The question of who applied the tattoos — whether Ötzi applied them himself, as might be possible for some locations, or whether they were applied by another person with specific knowledge of healing practice — cannot be answered from the available evidence. Neither can the question of whether they were all applied at one time or accumulated over his lifetime as responses to injuries and illnesses. The pattern of their distribution across areas with documented wear and degeneration is consistent with a lifetime of therapeutic application, but this remains an inference from correlation rather than a documented procedure.
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## The Copper Axe and What It Tells Us About Trade
The copper axe that accompanied Ötzi into his final hours is not just a tool and a weapon. It is a piece of evidence about the economic and social networks of late Copper Age Europe that extends far beyond the mountains where he died.
The axe head is made of nearly pure copper — roughly 99.7 percent copper with trace elements. Detailed geochemical analysis of those trace elements, combined with lead isotope analysis of the copper, traced the metal’s origin to ore deposits in what is now Tuscany in central Italy. The specific signature matched geological formations in the southern Tuscany mining region.
This is a remarkable finding. Ötzi died in the Alpine region of what is now northeastern Italy and western Austria. The ore that became his axe came from several hundred kilometers to the southwest, in a different geographical zone, produced by a different community or series of communities. For that metal to have reached him — as a finished axe head or as raw copper — it had to travel through exchange networks across a substantial portion of the Italian peninsula.