The Neolithic agricultural communities that had spread across Europe from Anatolia over the preceding several thousand years had established themselves across most of the continent, from the Atlantic coast to the Pontic steppe.

They had built megalithic monuments — the long barrows and stone circles of Atlantic Europe, the elaborate funerary monuments of the Iberian Peninsula, the Stonehenge tradition in Britain — that represented significant investments of collective labor and sophisticated astronomical and engineering knowledge.

They had also developed copper metallurgy to a degree that, in some regions, produced spectacular prestige objects.

The Copper Age in southeastern Europe, particularly in the cultures of modern Bulgaria and Romania, produced extraordinary copper and gold artifacts — the Varna Necropolis cemetery in Bulgaria, dated to roughly the same period as Ötzi, contained some of the oldest gold artifacts in the world, buried with individuals of clearly high social status.

The trade networks that moved copper, flint, amber, obsidian, and other prestige goods across Europe in this period connected communities from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Adriatic to the Atlantic. Ötzi’s flint came from the Trentino.