This sounds trivially obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of it when the past presents itself primarily as artifacts, documents, and statistical summaries.

The past can feel empty of people — full of things that people made, but not of the people themselves.

Ötzi is the people themselves.

He is a correction to the abstraction that archaeological knowledge tends toward, a restoration of the human specificity that the passage of time erases.

He was not a representative Copper Age European.

He was a person, with all the specificity and irreducibility that personhood implies.

He is also a reminder that science changes what we know.