Ötzi: The Man Who Fell Into Time

On 19 September 1991, Helmut and Erika Simon were walking near the Tisenjoch pass in the Ötztal Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy, when they spotted a body half-frozen in the ice at 3,210 meters. They assumed he was a recently lost climber. It took days of clumsy recovery attempts — pneumatic drills, ice axes, ski poles jabbed carelessly into the remains — before anyone grasped what they were dealing with. A longbow snapped in the struggle to free him; his left arm broke as his body was forced into a coffin for transport to Innsbruck. Only later, once archaeologist Konrad Spindler of the University of Innsbruck examined the find on 24 September, did the scale of the discovery become clear.

Spindler first guessed the body was at least four thousand years old, based on the style of an axe found nearby. Scientific dating later proved even more astonishing: the man had lived between 3359 and 3105 BC, some 5,100 years before his discovery, making him Europe's oldest known natural human mummy. He came to be called Ötzi, after the Ötztal Alps where he was found, though he's also known as the Iceman or the Similaun Man.

The discovery briefly reignited an old border dispute. Under the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the frontier between North and South Tyrol was meant to follow the watershed of the Inn and Etsch rivers. But the retreating glacier near Tisenjoch had muddied that line, and the border had been drawn too far north. Land surveys in October 1991 settled the matter: Ötzi lay 92.56 meters inside Italian territory. South Tyrol claimed ownership but allowed the University of Innsbruck to finish its research first. Since 1998, he has rested at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano.

What scientists found once they looked closely was a body extraordinarily well preserved by ice. At death, Ötzi stood about 160 cm tall, weighed roughly 50 kg, and was about 45 years old — elderly, by Copper Age standards. When recovered, his desiccated remains weighed just 13.75 kg. Early, sensational reports claimed his genitals had been lost; these were later disproven. Isotopic analysis of his tooth enamel and traces of pollen suggested he'd grown up near what is now the village of Feldthurns, north of Bolzano, before later settling in valleys some 50 kilometers farther north.

His last hours came into focus through his stomach and intestines. A 2009 CT scan found his stomach had shifted upward after death, revealing partially digested ibex meat eaten less than two hours before he died, along with wheat grains. Earlier analysis of his intestines showed two distinct meals: one of chamois, another of red deer and herb bread, both eaten with roots and fruit — the second meal roughly eight hours before death. The grain in both meals was a highly processed einkorn wheat, likely eaten as bread.