Otzi the Iceman is a 5,300-year-old murder victim preserved in glacier ice

In 1991, hikers in the Otztal Alps on the Italy-Austria border spotted a body emerging from melting ice. They assumed it was a lost mountaineer. It was a man who had died about 5,300 years ago, in the Copper Age — making Otzi one of the oldest natural human mummies ever found, older than the pyramids and Stonehenge.

Glacial ice preserved him with extraordinary completeness: skin, tattoos, clothing, and his gear, including a rare copper axe about 99.7% pure. That detail rewrote ideas about how early metal spread through Europe.

The biggest revelation came in 2001, when scans found an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder. It had torn an artery; Otzi likely bled to death within minutes. Far from a peaceful frozen traveller, he was a murder victim — and his astonishingly intact remains let researchers reconstruct a single prehistoric life in a depth no skeleton ever could.