On 19 September 1991, a German couple hiking high in the Ötztal Alps, on the ridge between Austria and Italy, took a shortcut off the marked path and saw something brown sticking out of the melting ice. It was a human body, face down in glacial meltwater, leathery and half-buried.

They reported it, and the authorities responded the way authorities do when a corpse turns up in the mountains: as a police matter. The assumption was a climber lost decades earlier, one of the dozens the glaciers give back in warm summers. Recovery crews went at the ice with a jackhammer and ice axes, damaging the body’s hip in the process, and shipped it to a morgue in Innsbruck with the other accident victims.

It took days for anyone to grasp what was actually lying on the table. The dead man had come from the Copper Age. He had been in the ice for around 5,300 years, longer than the Egyptian pyramids have existed, and he was the best-preserved prehistoric human ever found.

The man in the ice

He is known today as Ötzi, after the valley below the spot where he died, and he lives in a custom refrigeration chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, held at a constant minus six degrees Celsius and 99 percent humidity.

Because he freeze-dried in the ice rather than rotting, almost everything about him survived. He was around 45 years old, about 1.6 metres tall, sinewy and weathered. His last meal was still in his stomach: alpine ibex meat, red deer, and einkorn wheat, a heavy, fatty meal eaten not long before he died. His lungs were dark with soot from a lifetime of campfires. His joints showed wear, his arteries were hardening, and his gut carried a bacterium that still infects millions of people today.

Genetic work keeps refining the picture. A fresh sequencing of his genome, published in 2023, showed his ancestry traced overwhelmingly to the first farmers who spread into Europe from Anatolia, and that he was darker-skinned than the reconstructions long displayed in museums, with male-pattern baldness. He was not an exotic outsider either: a 2025 study of 47 other prehistoric individuals from the same valleys, published in Nature Communications, found the same farmer ancestry across the region, though Ötzi’s own maternal line matches no other population found so far, ancient or modern.

Sixty-one tattoos

Then there is his skin. Ötzi carries 61 tattoos, the oldest ever found on a human body: small groups of parallel lines and crosses made by cutting the skin and rubbing in charcoal, on his lower back, knees, ankles and wrist.

They do not look decorative. Most sit over joints that scans show were worn and arthritic, places where a 45-year-old who spent his life walking mountains would hurt. Many researchers read them as an early therapeutic practice, something like a Copper Age ancestor of acupuncture, applied where the pain was. Whatever they were for, someone did this to him repeatedly over years, which means he belonged to a community with traditions of treating its members.

The murder weapon

For a decade after the discovery, everyone assumed Ötzi had simply frozen, a shepherd caught out by weather. Then, in 2001, a radiologist looking at fresh X-rays noticed a small white shape under his left shoulder blade. It was a flint arrowhead.

Someone had shot him from behind. The arrow tore an artery near the shoulder, an injury that, according to recent clinical reviews of the wound, would have caused rapid, likely fatal blood loss even in a modern trauma unit. He also had a deep, unhealed gash across his right hand, a defensive wound from a fight days before he died, and a head injury from around the time of death. Whoever killed him did not rob him: his valuable copper axe, a rarity that marks him as a man of some standing, was left beside the body.

Put together, it reads like a story. A violent dispute in the valley. A wounded man retreating into the high mountains carrying his gear, including a new longbow he was still shaping and arrows mostly unfinished, as if he had lost his weapons and was hurriedly replacing them. And an enemy who followed, killed him from cover, pulled out the arrow shaft, and walked away leaving the axe, perhaps because carrying it home would have identified the killer.

None of it can be proven, which is the point. There is a victim, a weapon, a plausible motive and no suspect, five millennia cold. Investigators and archaeologists alike have called it, only half-jokingly, the world’s oldest open murder case.

Still giving up secrets

Thirty-five years on, the body keeps producing news. Just this month, researchers at Eurac in Bolzano published a full survey of the microbes on and in the mummy and found some of them still alive, dormant fungi and bacteria that colonized the corpse in the ice and have survived millennia in cold storage, making Ötzi less a museum piece than a functioning ecosystem.

Every generation of technology gets pointed at him — CT scanners, genome sequencers, protein analysis — and every generation finds something new: his last meal, his diseases, his relatives, his killer’s arrowhead. The hikers who spotted a brown shape in the ice thought they had found a missing person. In a sense they had. He had been missing for 5,300 years, and science is still taking his statement.