On September 19, 1991, two German hikers spotted what they assumed was a recently deceased mountaineer emerging from a melting glacier in the Alps near the Austrian-Italian border.
It took radiocarbon dating to establish the truth. The man had died around 3,250 BCE, making him the oldest naturally preserved human ever found.
Ötzi was 45 years old when he died, which was a significant age for his era.
He was short, wiry, left-handed, and carried an extraordinary copper axe with a blade that was 99.7 percent pure copper, an item so valuable and technically advanced that its discovery pushed back the accepted start of the European Copper Age by a thousand years.
High levels of copper and arsenic in his hair suggest he was involved in smelting it himself.
His 61 tattoos, made by rubbing charcoal into small skin incisions, clustered around his spine, knees, and ankles precisely where his bones showed the most arthritic damage.
They appear to have been therapeutic, targeting pain rather than serving as decoration.
In the days before his death, Ötzi descended from the mountains into a valley, where evidence shows he was involved in a violent fight. He had a deep defensive wound between his right thumb and forefinger from grabbing a blade.
Within hours he climbed back up to 10,500 feet, ate a large meal of ibex, red deer, and einkorn wheat, and stopped to rest.
He was shot from behind with an arrow that severed the subclavian artery. He bled to death within minutes. His valuable axe was left beside him.
#interesting #archeology #otzi
