Ötzi was first mistaken for a recently dead climber, then found in Italy by 92 metres
When two German hikers spotted a body sticking out of Alpine ice in September 1991, police assumed a modern mountaineer had died. The man was over 5,000 years old. A survey weeks later placed the spot just 92.56 metres inside Italy, which is why the Iceman now lives in Bolzano.
Helmut and Erika Simon found him near the Tisenjoch pass at roughly 3,210 metres on 19 September 1991. Recovery dragged on until 23 September because of bad weather, and nobody treated the site as archaeology. Visitors trampled fragile items and moved others without recording where they lay, a pneumatic drill damaged his hip, and his arm and bow were broken. It was the climber Reinhold Messner, seeing a sketch of the copper axe, who first suggested the remains might be far older than anyone thought.
Ötzi lived around 3275 to 3230 BC, in the Copper Age, and is Europe's oldest known natural human mummy. Glacier ice kept his organs, bones and tissue remarkably intact, although his outer skin, hair and nails had come away. Once thawed he began to decay and grow fungus, so scientists moved him into a cold cell mimicking glacial conditions. An arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder, along with other injuries, convinced researchers that another person killed him.
His clothing and kit are a snapshot of daily life. He wore a woven grass cloak, a bearskin cap and garments stitched from strips of sheep and goat leather, with DNA showing the sheep were closer to domestic breeds than wild ones. His broad waterproof shoes combined bearskin soles, deer hide and bark netting stuffed with grass; a Czech academic who copied them judged them skilled enough to suggest specialist shoemakers, though another archaeologist thinks they were parts of snowshoes.
He carried a copper axe on a yew handle, a flint knife, an unfinished yew longbow 1.82 metres long and a quiver of 14 arrows, only two of them finished. Two mushrooms hung on leather strings: a birch fungus that may have served as a medicine against parasites and a tinder fungus belonging to a fire-starting kit with flint, pyrite and over a dozen plants. His body and belongings are displayed at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.
Source: Ötzi
