But the ecological and human landscape was very different.

The valleys that now contain villages, roads, ski resorts, and the infrastructure of modern Alpine tourism were in Ötzi’s time home to small farming communities, their fields carved from the forest, their livestock grazing the mountain slopes in summer, their communities connected to each other and to the wider world by footpaths through the passes.

The specific hollow in the Ötztal Alps where Ötzi died — at roughly 3,200 meters elevation, above the current treeline — would have been at or slightly above the treeline in his time as well, in the open alpine terrain that farmers used for summer grazing and hunters used for game.

It was not a comfortable or convenient place to die, but it was not an impossible place to be.