Who was Otzi the Iceman? Otzi was a man who lived in the area where the Austrian Italian border is today in roughly 3250 BC.
Otzi the Iceman was found in 1991 by two German tourists called Helmut and Erika Simon. They saw the top part of his body sticking out of ice. An unusually warm summer had caused severe melting of the ice in the Alps. He was found in the Otztal Alps, which is where his name comes from. He was near Tisenjoch pass at a height of 3,210 meters in a protected gully. The pass is on the border of Austria and Italy. They thought that Otzi might be the body of a mountaineer who had died, so they reported it to the Italian and Austrian police. Before the body could be recovered, several other people visited the site and removed some of the artifacts that were with him. A couple of famous climbers examined some of those belongings and they guessed that the body was much older than a recently deceased climber.
Otzi was removed to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck for an examination. He was not treated with the care that was necessary and his body and several of the artifacts with him were damaged. In the medical center, he warmed up and started to decompose. It was a whole day before people realized what he was and he was placed in a freezer.
Otzi was very well preserved by the ice. He lost most of his hair, his nails, and his outer layer of skin, but the rest of him was preserved. Even down to his stomach and intestinal contents. His last meals consisted of meat from wild goat, and red deer, along with roots, fruits, and wheat grains from possibly bread. Also, close to his body and possibly coming from a bag he was carrying was found evidence of barley and wheat bran, along with flax and poppy seeds, and kernels of small plum-like fruits called sloes and wild berry seeds. It seemed like he had a varied diet, and the wheat bran showed signs of heavy processing, so it was probably bread.
We cannot know anything about Otzi for definite, but experts have made a lot of very good guesses. He was probably 160 cm tall and weighed 50 kg, which was most likely average. He was found with a copper axe blade and he had copper and arsenic in his hair. He was born during the Copper Age, which came between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, so he might have been a copper smelter. However, he was found high in the mountains and his leg bones showed signs that he spent a lot of time walking, so he could have been a mountain shepherd.
Otzi was covered in tattoos, especially on his legs and lower abdomen. The tattoos were probably made by puncturing the skin and injecting ash from a fire. Probably painful, but one theory is that they had pain relieving benefits in themselves, similar to acupuncture. Otzi had bad knees and a bad lower back, along with a tapeworm. The tattoos might have been to relieve that pain.
So, how did Otzi end up where he was? It is likely that he didn’t die where he was found and there are several theories as to how he ended up where he was found. When he was first discovered, the common theory was that he had been killed by exposure and had fallen into the gully, being covered with ice and preserved. However, further research discovered pollen on his body, which meant that he must have died in the spring. They also discovered an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder.
A theory in the early 2000s was that Otzi had been murdered. As well as the arrowhead in his shoulder, he had several serious cuts and bruises. They also found the DNA of four different people’s blood on his equipment. The theory was that he killed three people with his knife and the arrow that was found in his shoulder, and then carried the fourth person over his shoulder before being shot. How all this happened is anyone’s guess, but it makes for a romantic story. He then fell and assumed the position of his left arm bent across his chest to slow the blood loss.
A theory in 2010 suggested that Otzi died at a much lower altitude. The manner of his death may have been similar. His body was then left out in the sun to dry before being carried to the top of the mountain for burial. He would have been buried with all of his equipment surrounding him, and that could explain why he was found lower down with his gear scatted everywhere. Every time there was a warm summer, the ice might have melted and Otzi would have slid slightly further down the mountain, until he was found in the gully. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi
https://www.iceman.it/en/oetzi/the-iceman
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-true-story-behind-otzi-the-murdered-iceman-180981103
By Alex Lozupone – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=140496568