On September 19, 1991, Helmut and Erika Simon, German hikers crossing the Similaun glacier in the Otztal Alps, found a body in the ice at 3,210 metres. It was face down, partly frozen in meltwater, with the skin and the leather clothing visible. They assumed it was a climber who had died in an accident and reported it. Austria recovered it in September.
It was not a climber. Radiocarbon dating put the body at about 5,300 years old, in the Copper Age, and it turned out to be the oldest natural mummy in Europe and the best-preserved human body of that age anywhere. The ice had done what an Egyptian embalmer would have done: it dried the tissue and stopped the bacteria. The body weighed about 13 kilograms and was about 1.6 metres tall.
The border was wrong by about 90 metres and was corrected in 2006, which is why the mummy is in Bolzano in Italy rather than Innsbruck in Austria. That took a survey after the ice receded far enough to expose the find site properly. It ended a quarrel that had run since 1991.
The equipment made it valuable. Otzi had a copper axe with a yew handle and a lime-bast binding, a flint dagger with an ash-wood handle, a bow of yew that was unfinished, a quiver with fourteen arrows of which only two were finished, a birch-bark container, a net, a fire-starting kit with flint, pyrite and tinder fungus, and a bearskin cap and a coat of stitched goat and sheep hide with a grass cloak over it. He had tattoos: 61 of them, in groups of lines and a cross, over the joints and the lower back, which is where the earliest evidence for anything like acupuncture appears.
The body answered questions nobody had expected to ask. Analysis of his stomach contents showed red deer and ibex, and his last meal was eaten about eight hours before he died. Pollen dated the death to spring or early summer. In 2001 an X-ray found a flint arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder, with a cut on his hand and bruises on the head, and DNA on the arrows showed blood from at least two other people. He died where he was found, and he had help dying.