He was darker, genetically, than the popular image of ancient Europeans — darker than the reconstructions that artists had produced from assumptions about what “ancient European” should look like.

He was not what people expected.

He was what the evidence showed.

That gap — between expectation and evidence, between assumption and discovery — is what makes Ötzi one of the most important figures in the history of human self-knowledge.

He corrected assumptions.

He complicated simple narratives.

He showed that the past was different from what we imagined, darker-skinned and more connected and more brutal and more ordinary than the distance of five thousand years made it seem.

He is a frozen window into deep time.