Ötzi the Iceman: The 5,300-Year-Old Murder Victim Two Hikers Found in the Alps

On September 19, 1991, two German hikers on holiday, Erika and Helmut Simon, were crossing a rocky saddle called the Tisenjoch, high in the Ötztal Alps. At 3,210 meters above sea level, in a shallow gully full of meltwater, they saw something brown sticking out of the ice. It was the head and shoulders of a man, face down, his skin dried to the color of old leather.

They assumed, as everyone did at first, that they had found a climber killed in an accident some years before. The Alps give up such bodies most warm summers.

The man in the ice was not a lost climber. He had been lying in that gully for roughly 5,300 years. He had died in the Copper Age, more than six centuries before the Great Pyramid of Giza, carrying everything he owned. Over the next three decades he would become one of the most closely studied human bodies on Earth, and a prehistoric murder case that could be worked almost like a modern one. Journalists named him Ötzi.

Four days to get him out

The Simons reported the find to the landlord of the Similaun refuge, a hut on the ridge that marks the border between Austria and Italy. Because the body lay so close to the border, he called both the Austrian police and the Italian carabinieri. A dead hiker in a glacier was a matter for mountain rescue, not archaeology.

A first attempt to free the body the next day failed because the rescuers could not cut him out of the ice; the only thing they carried down was an axe found beside him. On September 21 a second attempt failed because no helicopter was free. That same day the hut’s landlord, Markus Pirpamer, climbed up to cover the body with a plastic sheet, and the mountaineers Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander came to look at the strange leather clothing and birch-bark containers. When Pirpamer showed them a sketch of the axe, Messner became the first person to suspect that the dead man was very old.

The body was finally freed on September 23, with ice picks, while a television crew filmed. There was still no archaeologist on site. The recovery was rough: a pneumatic drill damaged the mummy’s hip, his left arm was broken as he was handled, his bow was snapped, and pieces of his clothing were torn away and lost. A flint dagger lay beside the body, and a long stick nearby was later recognized as an unfinished bow.

He was flown to Vent, on the Austrian side, and driven in a hearse to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, like any other sudden death.

At least 4,000 years old

On September 24 the institute called in Konrad Spindler, a prehistorian at the University of Innsbruck. Judging by the type of the axe, he announced that the body was at least 4,000 years old. The corpse, already starting to decompose, was moved into a cold cell that imitated the glacier.

Radiocarbon dating at several laboratories later settled the question: the man had lived between about 3359 and 3105 BCE. The date usually given for his death is around 3230 BCE.

Then came an unexpected problem of geography. On October 2, 1991, surveyors measured the site and found that the body had lain just 92.56 meters inside Italy. The border had been drawn along the watershed after Italy annexed South Tyrol in the early 1920s, but deep snow hid the true watershed and the line went in slightly the wrong place. It is still the legal border, so the Iceman, studied in Austria at first, belonged to the Italian province of South Tyrol.

He needed a name. More than 500 nicknames were floated in the first few weeks. The one that stuck came from a Viennese journalist, Karl Wendl, who called him Ötzi, after the Ötztal Alps where he was found.

How a body survives 5,300 years

Most ancient mummies were made on purpose, their organs removed for burial. Ötzi was preserved by accident and almost whole. He died in a rocky hollow about three meters wide and seven long, and the hollow saved him. Snow and then glacier ice settled over the top, but the moving ice flowed past above him instead of grinding him to pieces against the rock. His body slowly lost its water, and when the warm summer of 1991 melted the ice, his upper body emerged into a pool of meltwater.

Ötzi is what scientists call a wet mummy: his tissue, bones and organs still hold enough structure to examine. The museum that keeps him calls him one of the best-researched individuals in the world, and the details are strikingly personal.

He was about 46 years old when he died, a good age for his time. In life he stood about 1.60 meters tall and weighed about 50 kilograms, with very little body fat. His shoe size would be a European 38. Clumps of hair found around the body show that he had dark, medium-length hair, worn loose. He had no wisdom teeth, a gap between his upper front teeth, and badly worn teeth with cavities, which researchers link to the farming diet of his era.

His body was a record of hard living: worn hips, shoulders, knees and spine, and old breaks in several ribs and his nose. His lungs were blackened with soot from years beside open fires. He carried whipworm in his gut, two human fleas in his clothing, and the oldest known genetic traces of Borrelia, the bacteria behind Lyme disease. The one fingernail recovered from the ice has three Beau’s lines, grooves that form when illness interrupts nail growth. They suggest he was seriously ill three times in his last six months.

And he was tattooed. Sixty-one marks cover his body, all lines and small crosses, made by rubbing soot or charcoal into the skin. They sit on his lower back, his ribcage, a wrist, a knee, his calves and ankles, mostly in places clothing would have hidden and mostly over joints that X-rays show were worn and probably painful. That pattern has led researchers to suggest the tattoos were a kind of therapy rather than decoration. Some compare them to acupuncture, though Ötzi lived at least 2,000 years before its earliest known use in China.

The toolkit of a Copper Age traveler

If his body was a medical file, his belongings were a time capsule: the full kit of one man, wood, leather, grass and bark included, and some of it unique.

The most valuable thing he carried was his axe. Its trapezoid blade is 99.7 percent copper, cast in a mold and hammered hard, then fixed into a yew haft about 60 centimeters long with birch tar and leather strapping. It is the only prehistoric axe of its kind ever found complete. In the Copper Age, a copper axe was a mark of status, often buried with high-ranking men. A 2017 study of the lead isotopes in the blade found that the copper came not from the Alps but from southern Tuscany, hundreds of kilometers to the south, "despite ample evidence that Alpine copper ore sources were known and exploited at the time." The man in the ice was part of a trading world much larger than his valley.

He also carried a 13-centimeter flint dagger with an ash handle in a sheath woven from lime-tree bast, the only fully preserved dagger from the European Copper Age. The flint came from what is now Trentino, to the south. His bow was a 1.82-meter stave of yew that he was still shaping with his axe. It was nearly finished but had no string. His deer-hide quiver held twelve unfinished arrow shafts and just two finished arrows, tipped with flint and fletched with feathers glued on with birch tar.

Two cylinders of birch bark, stitched together with bast, served as containers. The inside of one was blackened and held fresh Norway maple leaves and pieces of charcoal. Researchers think he carried live embers wrapped in the leaves, a way of keeping fire on the move. He also had a firelighting kit with tinder fungus, birch polypore threaded on leather strips, small flint tools, a tool for sharpening flint, and the frame of a backpack. One thing he did not carry was pottery, a small frustration for archaeologists, since pottery styles are one of the best ways to tie a person to a particular culture.

His clothes were made with as much thought. He wore a coat stitched from strips of goat and sheep hide, leggings of goatskin, a sheepskin loincloth, a belt with a pouch, and a fur cap. A 2016 analysis of the DNA in the leather found that most of it came from domestic animals, cattle, sheep and goats, but that the cap was made from brown bear and the quiver from roe deer. His shoes had bearskin soles, deer-hide uppers and an inner net of lime bast stuffed with grass to keep his feet warm.

An arrow in the back

For ten years, many assumed Ötzi had died of exposure in a high pass. Then, in 2001, X-rays showed something that had been missed. Lodged in his left shoulder was a flint arrowhead. A small matching tear in his coat marked where it had gone in. The arrow had struck him from behind, and a later study concluded that it tore an artery beneath his collarbone. He would have bled to death quickly, from a wound that might have been fatal even in a modern hospital.

The shaft had been pulled out before he died, and further examination found a head injury as well. He also had a deep cut at the base of his right thumb, reaching to the bone. That wound had begun to heal, which means he got it a few days before his death, likely in a hand-to-hand fight.

The museum in Bolzano now states plainly that there can be no doubt Ötzi was murdered. The puzzle is what happened around the killing. His killer did not take the copper axe, by far the most valuable object he had. A 2010 study argued that Ötzi might have died lower down and been carried up to the pass for a kind of burial, but other researchers, among them Albert Zink of the Eurac Institute for Mummy Studies, have disputed that, pointing to the position of the body and the state of the arrow wound. Pollen in his gut and the green maple leaves in his birch-bark container suggest he died in late spring or early summer.

His makeshift repairs hint that he had not lived in a settlement for some time. Whether he was a trader, a shepherd, a chieftain or a fugitive is still argued.

His last meal

In 2018 a team led by Eurac Research analyzed his stomach contents for DNA, proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Ötzi ate his last big meal between half an hour and two hours before he died, which suggests he felt safe at the time. It was ibex fat and meat, red deer, einkorn wheat (one of the oldest domesticated grains), and traces of bracken fern, which is toxic.

The researchers were struck by how much ibex fat there was, an efficient fuel at high altitude. The ibex meat was so well preserved that its muscle fibers were still visible, which shows it had been air-dried or barely heated rather than roasted or boiled. Fibers keep that structure only below about 60°C. The bracken is a mystery. It may have been a remedy for the parasites in his gut, or simply a leaf he used to wrap his food.

The man in the ice was part of a trading world much larger than his valley.

What his genes say

Ötzi’s genome was first sequenced in 2012, and a much more complete version was published in 2023 by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Eurac Research. It changed his portrait.

The 2023 study found no trace of the Steppe herders from the east whose ancestry runs through most modern Europeans. Instead, Ötzi carried an unusually high share of ancestry from early farmers who had spread into Europe from Anatolia. His closest living relatives, genetically, are among the people of Sardinia and Corsica. His skin was much darker than most reconstructions had shown. "It’s the darkest skin tone that has been recorded in contemporary European individuals," said Albert Zink, a co-author of the study. The same genes suggest he was probably balding, not the long-haired figure of the first reconstructions, and that he had a genetic predisposition to diabetes and obesity. Earlier work had found a risk of heart disease, lactose intolerance and blood type O.

The life-size model in the Bolzano museum, made by the Dutch paleoartists Adrie and Alfons Kennis from CT scans and a model of his skull, shows a wiry, weathered man. Like every reconstruction, it is part science and part informed guess.

A finder’s fee and a cold cell

Once it was clear what the Simons had found, a long argument began over who deserved credit and how much they were owed. Others claimed to have seen the body first. Under Italian law, the finders were entitled to 25 percent of its value, a figure no one could sensibly put on a 5,300-year-old man. In 1994 the provincial government offered the couple 10 million lire, about 5,200 euros, and they refused. A court in Bolzano recognized the Simons as the official discoverers in 2003. Helmut Simon died the following year, before the case ended. An appeals court upheld the ruling in 2006, and in September 2008, seventeen years after the find, Erika Simon and the province agreed on a payment of 150,000 euros.

Since 1998 Ötzi has lain in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, in a cell that recreates the glacier. He rests on precision scales at minus 6°C and 99 percent humidity, sprayed regularly with sterile water, and visitors see him through a small window. The mummy weighs about 13 kilograms. More than seven million people have come to look since the museum opened, and with nearly 300,000 visitors a year it is the most visited museum in South Tyrol.

Up on the Tisenjoch, a stone obelisk now stands about 70 meters from the gully where he lay.

Why he still matters

Like the planes of the Lost Squadron, which came out of the Greenland ice as Glacier Girl, he survived because ice can protect as well as destroy. Like the Antikythera mechanism, he has been reexamined as each new tool appears, from CT scanning to ancient DNA, and each has turned up something the last one missed. And unlike Piltdown Man, the fake ancestor that fooled science for decades, he is utterly real, a single person whose bad luck in a mountain pass has given us an unmatched view of ordinary life in the Copper Age.

The most moving details are the small ones. A man with sore knees and a bad back, eased perhaps with soot tattoos. A traveler carrying embers wrapped in maple leaves. Someone who had been ill three times in half a year and cut his hand to the bone in a fight, and still climbed above 3,000 meters with a half-made bow. He sat down, or fell, in a gully in early summer and bled to death from an arrow in the back. Then the snow came, and for 5,300 years he waited for a warm September.

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