Cool!

And that isn't a reference to the permafrost where the mummy was found.

The spectacular find of the frozen remains of a Scythian warrior in Mongolia by an international team of archeologists could shed new light on ancient life. Some of those findings will be the subject of a major exhibition in Berlin next year.

Scientists in Berlin this week gave their first major press conference about the spectacular discovery of a frozen mummy in Mongolia's Altai mountains. The frozen corpse, embedded in permafrost, is considered one of the greatest archeological finds since climbers came across the mummified remains of Ötzi, the ice man, in an alpine glacier. The corpse of the Scythian warrior could help provide clues about how people lived 2,500 years ago and about what illnesses they suffered.

"The mummy is unbelievably valuable to science," Hermann Parzinger, president of the German Archeological Institute (DAI), said on Thursday in Berlin. He described the mummy recently discovered in Mongolia as a "one of a kind find" that could increase our knowledge about the nutrition and health of early man.

The mummy, which is believed to be about 2,500 years old was a 30-to-40 year-old man with blond hair, and was found in very good condition, Patzinger said. It's too delicate for exhibition, but new techniques developed following other recent discoveries of frozen mummies will enable scientists to study the remains in detail. The newly discovered Altai mummy has been compared to the discovery of Ötzi in southern Tyrol in 1991 and a tattooed Siberian ice princess in 1993.

Wikipedia has a good article on Scythia and the Scythians, if you want more information on these fierce warriors.

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