These are the limits of what physical evidence and genomic analysis can recover from the deep past.

The outer record — material, biological, molecular — can be preserved by ice and recovered by science.

The inner record — linguistic, experiential, cultural, personal — cannot be frozen and cannot be sequenced.

It is gone with the people who held it.

Ötzi is both the closest we have come to meeting a prehistoric person and the clearest demonstration of how far that meeting falls short of true encounter.

He is here, in a very real sense — preserved, studied, his genome sequenced and analyzed and placed in comparative context.