Ötzi The Iceman: The Ancient Murder Victim Found In The European Alps
Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty ImagesÖtzi’s body was so well-preserved that he looked like a mountaineer who died in modern times.
On September 19, 1991, two German hikers named Helmut and Erika Simon were trekking through the Austro-Italian Alps when they found a corpse in the ice. They alerted Austrian rescue workers, who believed the body belonged to a mountaineer who had died recently. A series of careless excavation procedures then led to some damage to the corpse.
But medical experts in Austria eventually realized the rescue workers’ error. As it turned out, the corpse was quite far from recently deceased. Ötzi the Iceman, as he came to be known, was actually a 5,300-year-old Neolithic man — one of the oldest preserved bodies in history.
While most mummies are preserved by drying out the corpse in some way and secluding it from environmental factors, Ötzi is considered a “wet” mummy. His body was perfectly preserved, frozen in the ice, and the humidity of the glacier kept his organs and skin intact.
The strange, immaculate preservation allowed researchers to essentially perform a modern autopsy on Ötzi. This offered significant insight into what the man’s life had been like way back in the Copper Age.
Paul Hanny/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesGerman tourists Helmut and Erika Simon had found Ötzi with his head and shoulders protruding from the ice.
They were able to determine that Ötzi was in his 40s when he died, that he had weighed roughly 110 pounds, and that he stood about five feet, three inches tall, according to Live Science. He had intestinal parasites, stomach ulcers, and arthritis, and he might have been lactose intolerant.
Ötzi shared a genetic affinity with people who came from the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Corsica. He also had 61 tattoos, made by rubbing charcoal into small cuts across the surface of his skin.
But while researchers have gained a wealth of information from studying Ötzi’s body, the question of how, exactly, he died still remains somewhat of a mystery. Many believe that he was murdered — because there was an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder. His belongings hadn’t been taken, suggesting this murder may have been of a personal nature.
Of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure, given that any witnesses or suspects have been dead for well over 5,000 years.
Today, Ötzi is stored in a freezer at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where countless people remain in awe of his remains.