The oldest known tattoos belong to "Ötzi the Iceman," a 5,300-year-old mummy a pair of German hikers discovered in a glacier along the Austrian-Italian border in 1991, according to a paper slated to publish in the February 2016 edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
Scholars have for years debated whether Ötzi was actually the oldest tattooed human, according to Smithsonian Science News, because scientists identified a tattoo of a pencil-thin mustache on a South American mummy from the Chinchurro region that they initially dated back to about 4000 B.C.
But new research has determined that the Chinchorro mummy was not as old as originally believed, and that Ötzi actually predates it by at least 500 years.
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