When hikers found a body poking out of an Alpine glacier in 1991, they assumed it was a lost climber. It turned out to be a 5,300-year-old murder victim — with the arrow still in his shoulder.
On September 19, 1991, two German hikers walking in the Ötztal Alps on the Austria-Italy border spotted what they assumed was a recently deceased mountaineer lying face-down in the ice. When authorities arrived and started extracting the body, they realized the corpse was wearing leather and grass clothing and carrying a copper axe. Archaeologist Konrad Spindler, called to examine the find, dated it to roughly 4,000 years old — an astonishing underestimate. It was actually over 5,300 years old.
Ötzi, as he was nicknamed after the valley where he was found, is the oldest known natural human mummy in Europe. He died around 3,300 BC — before the Egyptian pyramids were built. His preservation was a fluke of Alpine conditions: he was buried quickly under snow and ice, freeze-dried rather than decayed, and stayed frozen for over five millennia before a period of unusual warmth exposed him.
For a decade after his discovery, scientists debated how he had died. The leading theories ranged from exposure to ritual sacrifice. Then in 2001, a CT scan revealed something that had been missed: an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder. The arrow had pierced his subclavian artery, and he had bled to death. He was also found to have a deep wound in his right hand, consistent with grabbing an attacker's blade — evidence of a violent struggle shortly before his death.
Ötzi's last day has been reconstructed in extraordinary detail. His stomach contents showed he had eaten a large meal — ibex meat, red deer, einkorn wheat bread, and other plants — roughly 30 to 60 minutes before he died. He was well-fed and well-equipped. The blood of at least four other people was found on his tools and clothing, suggesting he had been in or near a fight with multiple assailants before being shot.
His equipment was sophisticated and reveals a great deal about late Stone Age life. He carried a nearly pure copper axe (the ore had been sourced from Tuscany, hundreds of miles away), a flint knife, a longbow he was still finishing, fourteen arrows, and a collection of medicinal mushrooms. His clothing was made from the hides of at least five different animal species, carefully selected for their properties — bearskin for his shoes' soles, deer hide for the upper panels.
DNA analysis has revealed surprising details about who Ötzi was. A 2023 genome study found he had very dark skin, was likely going bald, and was probably lactose intolerant. His closest living genetic relatives are found today among the people of Corsica and Sardinia — island populations that have remained relatively isolated. He also had a genetic predisposition toward cardiovascular disease.
Ötzi is now preserved at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, displayed in a specially designed cold cell kept at -6°C. He remains the most scientifically studied human in history, still yielding new discoveries with each advance in DNA technology. His murder has never been solved.