The 5,300-Year-Old Man Found Frozen In The Alps — And The DNA Test That Revealed His Hidden Origins
These artifacts allowed reconstruction of technology and economy, but they were abstract in a way that a body is not.
Knowing that Copper Age people made grass cloaks is different from seeing a grass cloak.
Knowing that they made copper axes is different from holding the axe that a specific man carried for the last time when he was 45 years old.
Ötzi made the Copper Age personal.
He converted abstract knowledge of a period into the specific, embodied reality of a specific person.
He is not a representative of his time in the way that an artifact is representative — he is an individual who happened to survive in an extraordinary way, allowing us to know him in his specificity rather than in his generality.
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