The first picture of Ötzi as he emerged from the melting ice, taken by the finders – the German couple Helmut and Erika Simon, in 1991.

26 comments

  1. Ötzi, also called the Iceman, is the natural mummy of a man who lived some time between 3350 and 3105 BC, discovered in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy.

  4. What I find the coolest is the scenario they came up with based on data. He apparently had blood from four different people on him. Three were believed to have been people he killed based on the blood found on his tools(1 on knife and 2 from arrowhead) And the fourth is believed to have been a friend/a foe he had carried on his shoulders and was bleeding on his clothes.

    What’s even stranger is that the cause of death came from an arrow head lodging into Otzi’s shoulder and causing enough blood loss to claim him life. Whoever delivered this fatal blow didn’t even bother to bury or displace the body but instead let the elements do their work. 5000 years later we can only wonder what truly went down that day.

    Additional information if anyone is super fascinated.
    Otzi was most likely a smelter since copper was found on his hair, and he had a 99% copper ax. He had extensive tattoos that were most likely used as acupuncture to help him cope with joint pain. He had eaten twice the day he died, and the pollen found on him shows that he had died in Spring/Summer. After a DNA test in the local area it had shown that there were 19 descendants of Otzi living near the area.

  5. For a moment there I read “Ozil” (as in the football player) and thought “well everything makes sense now”

  14. At first he was believed to be a missing skier, IIRC. There was a TV interview with a pathologist and he was complaining about how Ötzi didn’t have a passport or other documents on him, which made him hard to identify. It’s somewhere on YouTube.

  22. When I was elementary school in the 90s we’d go to the library just to have look at a book about Ötzi. We probably went there 20 times because we found it so fascinating.

  23. Weird question, but how didn’t his body get soft and soaked as he seems to be laying in liquid water? Or how didn’t decomposition start again upon being exposed to positive temperatures and liquid water?

  24. Six grade teacher here! It was first thought he died from hypothermia. After more scientists looked at him it was discovered he had a flint arrow in his shoulder and signs of hand to hand combat on his hands. He was clearly murdered. He is one of the oldest mummies we have and we’ve learned a lot about everything from religious tattoos to diet from him.

  26. We learned about him in school.

    A little Backstory:

    In September 1991, two German tourists were on a holiday in the alps.

    One day, they were walking along a path, when they saw something in the ice. They thought it was a body or a part of a body of a climber but they werent looking at the body of a climber.

    The body was over 5300 years old. they were looking at a man from the stone age.

    Ötzi as the archaeologists called him, lived between 3350 bc and 3100 bc. Over 600 years before the Egyptians built the Pyramids. He came from northern Italy and he was about 46 years old. That was pretty old in the Stone Age because people didnt live that long. He was about 1.6m tall or 5.2 feet. He was a farmer because they scientists found pieces of corn in his clothes. He was probably taking his sheep and goats into the mountains when he died.

    Ötzi changed our ideas about the stone age since before Ötzi people thought that copper didnt arrive in Europe until 2000bc. However Ötzi was carrying a copper axe 1300 before the estimated year of arrival of copper in Europe.

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