The Body On The Glacier

The summer of 1991 was unusually warm across the Alps.

The snowpack was thin.

The glaciers retreated further than they had in decades, pulling back from their own margins and exposing rock and dirt and, in one alpine valley on the border between Austria and Italy, something that had not been visible since before the first pharaohs of Egypt built the first pyramid.

On September 19, a pair of German tourists named Helmut and Erika Simon were descending from the Fineilspitze peak in the Ötztal Alps when they noticed something in the ice and rock at the edge of a small glacial pool at roughly 3,200 meters elevation.

What they saw at first appeared to be a discarded piece of clothing, or perhaps a climber’s doll.

Then the angle of light shifted, and it resolved into something else entirely.

A human back.

A skull.

Darkened, leathery skin stretched over the distinctive contours of a real human face, pressed into the sediment at the edge of the glacier’s retreating margin.

They had found a body.

The following days were chaotic in ways that are, in retrospect, both understandable and costly to science.

Initial assumptions were that this was the recent victim of a mountaineering accident — the Alps claim lives every year, and frozen bodies have been recovered before.

Local authorities were contacted.

A recovery effort was launched with the kind of physical tools — ice picks, ski poles, a pneumatic drill — that would be appropriate for recovering a recent victim, but that were catastrophically wrong for what this body actually was.

What this body was, as dating techniques would soon establish, was approximately 5,300 years old.

The man later named Ötzi — for the Ötztal Alps, the range where he was found — had died sometime around 3300 to 3100 BCE, in the period that archaeologists call the Copper Age or Chalcolithic period: the transitional era between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, when humans were beginning to work copper into tools and weapons but had not yet learned to alloy it with tin to produce the harder metal that would define the next great technological epoch.

He had been dead for approximately 5,300 years, preserved by the specific conditions of his resting place with a fidelity that no laboratory could replicate: first by the freeze that followed his death, then by the compression of ice accumulating above him, then by a gradual burial under snow and ice that protected him from the deterioration that time inflicts on everything organic.