Ötzi the Iceman was found by hikers on 19 September 1991

German hikers Erika and Helmut Simon found Ötzi the Iceman on 19 September 1991, at 3,210 metres near the Tisenjoch pass on the Austrian–Italian border. Everyone treated him as a recent climbing accident, and it took five days before an archaeologist saw the body.

Only his upper body was sticking out of the meltwater. The Simons told the landlord of the nearby Similaun refuge. He called both the Austrian police and the Italian carabinieri, because nobody was sure which country the gully was in. What happened next, from the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology’s record:

• 20 September: Rescuers fail to free the body from the ice and give up in bad weather. They take only his axe down to the valley.
• 21 September: No helicopter is available. Reinhold Messner and Hans Kammerlander see the leather clothing and a sketch of the axe. Messner is the first to suspect the corpse is very old.
• 23 September: The body is cut out with ice picks on camera, with no archaeologist present. A forensic scientist from Innsbruck oversees its transport in a body bag.
• 24 September: Innsbruck prehistorian Konrad Spindler sees it and estimates it is “at least 4000 years old”.
• 2 October: A survey finds the site lies just 92.56 metres inside Italy. The border, drawn after Italy annexed South Tyrol, had been surveyed when deep snow hid the true watershed.

Radiocarbon dating later put him at around 3250 BC, more than 5,000 years old. Proper excavation of the gully only started in July and August 1992, when the team cleared snow and ice with steam blowers and recovered his bearskin cap. Since 1998 he has lain in a cold cell in Bolzano, Italy.

The neat “time capsule” story has also been questioned. In a 2022 review in The Holocene, glacial archaeologist Lars Pilø and colleagues argued that Ötzi probably melted out and refroze several times in his first 1,500 years. They think natural processes at the site, not a fight, damaged his quiver, backpack and bow. The arrow wound is still accepted: the X-ray evidence that he was murdered stands.