Decked in a magnificent fur mantle and gilded wooden headdress, a nomad—probably a fierce warrior—was buried more than 2200 years ago in the icy highlands of Mongolia. This week, a team of archaeologists, led by Hermann Parzinger, director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, announced that they had found his partially mummified remains. The finding will reveal more about the culture and conditions that preserved the body. It is urgent work, observers say, because a warmer environment could destroy specimens like this.
    In 2004, the 30-member team from Germany, Russia, and Mongolia surveyed more than a dozen stone-covered burial mounds in northwestern Mongolia. Last year, they returned to the 2600-meter-high plateau in the Altai region, a remote mountain range that borders Russia, China, and Mongolia, with electromagnetic sensors, temperature probes, and other instruments to look for ice layers that might indicate intact burials.
    Parzinger has made spectacular finds before. In 2001, he pulled nearly 20 kilograms of artfully worked jewelry out of a similar grave mound in the Russian republic of Tuva. Archaeologists say the Altai plateaus are the burial grounds of the Pazyryk, members of a larger Scythian culture that occupied Central Asia as early as the 9th century B. C. and struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians.
    Scythians used a distinctive type of embalming, says Esther Jacobson-Tepfer, an archaeologist and art historian at the University of Oregon, Eugene. "They removed the innards and filled the body with sweet-smelling grasses." High-status individuals were dressed, surrounded by goods, and buried under earth and stone mounds, or kurgans.
    Shortly after burial, water sometimes seeped through the stones and froze, forming ice lenses insulated by the stone mounds above and permafrost underneath. The body found this summer was surrounded by slain horses and dressed in felt boots. Fantastical animal tattoos were visible on the man's skin. "Instead of archaeology, the material culture is so well preserved it's almost a kind of ethnography," Parzinger says.
    Parzinger's success comes as the Altai's permafrost is melting fast. "The warming up of the general climate is a danger for these kurgans," Parzinger says. As rising temperatures threaten to bring the mummies out of deep freeze, the Scythian royalty may face decay and disintegration for the first time in millennia.
    Questions:

问答题   What did Hermann Parzinger find? What is the significance of this discovery?

问答题   What can we learn about Scythians from Paragraph 3?

问答题   Why could the dead bodies be kept intact?

问答题   Why does Parzinger say the material is a kind of ethnography instead of archaeology?

问答题   What would be the best title for the passage?