These traces are indirect.

They tell us about the past without allowing us to meet it.

Even the most detailed historical record gives us a picture, not a person.

Ötzi gives us a person.

A specific, individual human being who lived a specific life in a specific place at a specific time, whose body survived with sufficient completeness that we can know him — not fully, not in every dimension of his humanity, but in ways that no other relic of his era can provide.

We know what he ate for his last meal.