Hikers stumbled on a 5,000-year-old murder victim
On this day · 19 September 1991
On September 19, 1991, two walkers in the Alps found a body in the ice that turned out to be Europe's oldest natural mummy.
On September 19, 1991, German holidaymakers Erika and Helmut Simon were hiking high in the Ötztal Alps when they spotted a brown human corpse jutting from melting ice near the Tisenjoch pass, at about 3,210 meters on the Italian-Austrian border.
They assumed it was an unlucky modern climber. It was not. Radiocarbon dating placed the man at roughly 3,250 BCE, making the body, nicknamed Ötzi, more than 5,000 years old and the oldest natural human mummy in Europe. Alpine wind had dried him and glacial ice had sealed him, preserving skin, organs, clothing, and gear.
He carried a copper axe, a bow, and a quiver of arrows.
Later scans revealed an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder, recasting a quiet archaeological find as a cold case. Ötzi had been shot from behind and bled out in the mountains. He now rests in a refrigerated chamber at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano.
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