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Ötztal Alps, Italian and Austrian border
35 years ago

On September 19, 1991, two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, were walking off the marked path at about 3,200 metres in the Ötztal Alps when they saw a human head and shoulders protruding from meltwater at the edge of a glacier. They assumed it was a mountaineer who had died in recent decades, which is common enough in the high Alps, and reported it. The recovery, carried out over several days by Austrian authorities with pneumatic drills and ice axes, damaged the body and its equipment considerably.

It became clear only afterward, from the copper axe found with him, that the body was not modern. Radiocarbon dating placed him at roughly 3300 BCE, more than five thousand years old. The body had been freeze-dried rather than decomposed, preserved by a combination of cold, ice cover, and the particular hollow in the rock where he came to rest. He is the oldest natural human mummy in Europe, and the border between Italy and Austria was resurveyed to determine which country he belonged to. He was found to lie about ninety metres inside Italy.

What made the find extraordinary was not just the body but everything with it. Ötzi was dressed in a coat of sheep and goat hide, leggings, a bearskin cap, and shoes insulated with grass, and he carried a copper axe, a flint dagger, a quiver of arrows, a longbow that was unfinished, a birch bark container, a fire-starting kit, and lumps of birch fungus with medicinal properties. Nearly all of it was organic material that almost never survives from the period. In effect the equipment of a Copper Age man had been preserved in working order.

Ten years after the discovery, a radiologist reexamining the X-rays noticed a flint arrowhead lodged in the left shoulder. It had severed an artery. Further study found a deep cut on one hand, bruising, and a blow to the head. Ötzi had not simply frozen; he had been shot from behind and had died within a short time, probably from blood loss. Traces of blood from four other people were found on his equipment. Whatever happened on that mountain, he had been in a fight.

Study of the body has continued for more than three decades and has produced a level of biological detail unavailable for any other prehistoric individual. His genome has been sequenced, showing dark skin and eyes and a predisposition to heart disease. His stomach contents revealed a last meal of ibex and red deer meat, einkorn wheat, and fern. He had worn teeth, joint damage, hardened arteries, a stomach infection, and more than sixty tattoos, mostly lines and crosses over joints, which some researchers read as an early form of therapeutic treatment. He is kept in a purpose-built refrigerated chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano.

Two hikers found a body in a melting glacier on September 19, 1991, and assumed it was a lost climber. He was more than five thousand years old, dressed and equipped for the mountains, and carrying a copper axe. Ten years later someone spotted an arrowhead in his shoulder. He had been shot from behind.

How much do you know about the discovery of Ötzi, the equipment found with him, the arrowhead in his shoulder, and what modern analysis has revealed about his life?