Ötzi the Iceman: A Murder in the Alps

On 19 September 1991, two German hikers, Erika and Helmut Simon, took a shortcut near the Tisenjoch pass, 3,210 metres up in the Ötztal Alps. In a gully of melting ice they saw a brown body, head and shoulders exposed. They assumed it was a climber who had died recently.

It took days, and a clumsy recovery with a jackhammer and ice picks, before anyone realised the truth. The axe beside him was not modern. The man in the ice had been dead for more than 5,000 years. He was soon nicknamed Ötzi, after the valley.

Why he is so well preserved

Ötzi died in a rocky hollow that sheltered him from the grinding movement of the glacier above. His body dried out in cold, windy conditions and was then sealed by snow and ice, a combination of freeze-drying and natural mummification. The ice had not crushed him, and his clothing and equipment lay around him — the most complete kit ever found from prehistoric Europe.

The spot was later surveyed to be about 92 metres inside Italy, which is why he now lies in a special refrigerated cell in Bolzano, kept at −6 °C and high humidity to mimic the glacier.

A murder, solved 5,000 years late

For ten years, researchers assumed Ötzi died of exposure. Then in 2001 the radiologist Paul Gostner noticed a flint arrowhead in Ötzi’s left shoulder on an X-ray. It had torn the subclavian artery, which would have caused massive bleeding within minutes. The arrow entered from behind and below.

The shaft had been pulled out. He also had a head injury, possibly from a fall or blow, and a deep, partly healed cut on his right hand of the kind you might get by grabbing a blade — suggesting he had been fighting a day or two before he died. Who killed him and why remains unknown. Whoever it was left his valuable copper axe behind, so it probably wasn’t robbery.

His last meal

Because his stomach was preserved, we know what Ötzi ate in his final hours. A 2018 study by Frank Maixner and colleagues found ibex meat and red deer, einkorn wheat and bracken fern, and an unusually high amount of fat — almost half the contents. Fat-rich food makes sense in a cold, high-altitude environment. The bracken is puzzling, as it is toxic; it may have been used to wrap food.

Pollen in his gut, from hop-hornbeam trees in bloom, suggests he died in spring or early summer, and that he had travelled from the valleys up to the high pass in his final day or two.

Copper, flint and fungus: his gear

• Copper axe: a yew haft with a blade of almost pure copper. Lead isotope analysis in 2017 traced the copper to southern Tuscany, hundreds of kilometres away, showing long-distance trade.
• Bow and arrows: an unfinished yew longbow about 1.8 metres long and a quiver of 14 arrows, only two of them finished. He may have been re-equipping in a hurry.
• Flint dagger in a woven sheath, plus a retoucher for sharpening flint.
• Two birch fungi on leather strips — possibly as medicine, as birch polypore has antibacterial properties — and tinder fungus with traces of pyrite for fire-making.
• Clothing: a bear-fur cap, a coat and leggings from sheep and goat hide, a leather loincloth and shoes with bearskin soles, deer-hide uppers and grass insulation. (See when humans started wearing clothes.)

Tattoos as medicine?

Ötzi carries 61 tattoos — groups of short parallel lines and small crosses, made by rubbing charcoal into small cuts. They are among the oldest tattoos known on a preserved human body. Many sit over joints and the lower back, where CT scans show he had wear and arthritis. That has led researchers to suggest they were therapeutic, a kind of pain treatment, rather than decorative.

A sick man

Ötzi’s body is a catalogue of ailments. He had worn joints, hardened arteries, gum disease and tooth decay, whipworm eggs in his gut, and DNA from Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease — the oldest known case. His stomach carried a strain of Helicobacter pylori that helped researchers trace ancient migrations into Europe. Genetically, he had a predisposition to heart disease, and he was lactose intolerant.

What his genome revealed — twice

Ötzi’s genome was first sequenced in 2012. That early analysis suggested some ancestry from the Pontic steppe and a light-skinned appearance, which influenced museum reconstructions.

In 2023, Ke Wang, Johannes Krause and colleagues published a much higher-quality genome. The steppe signal turned out to be contamination from modern DNA. Ötzi’s ancestry was about 90% early Anatolian farmer — the people who brought agriculture to Europe — with a modest share from local hunter-gatherers and none from the steppe herders who would later transform European ancestry.

He also had darker skin than the reconstruction implied, and variants associated with male-pattern baldness. Rather than a light-skinned man with thick hair, Ötzi was likely darker-skinned and balding. His closest genetic matches today are in Sardinia, which preserves an unusually large share of early farmer ancestry. (For why European skin colour was once darker, see the evolution of human skin colour.)

The “curse”

Popular media have claimed that Ötzi is cursed, pointing to several people associated with his discovery and study who have died, including Helmut Simon, who died in a mountain fall in 2004. Given that hundreds of people have worked on Ötzi, a handful of deaths is statistically unremarkable. The curse is a good story, not evidence.

Why Ötzi matters

Most prehistoric people are known from a scatter of bones and some tools. Ötzi gives us one individual with his clothes, his tools, his wounds, his illnesses, his last meal and his genome. He shows that a man in the Copper Age Alps used metal traded from Tuscany, treated his aches with tattoos, carried his own first-aid kit, and died violently in the mountains — and that ancient DNA can overturn even well-established conclusions when better data arrive.