A 5,300-year-old murder mystery that stunned the world

Reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman at South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. Image: © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology/Ochsenreiter

In September 1991, two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, were quietly hiking at a height of over 3,200 metres in Giogo di Tisa in the Val Senales Valley, a section of the Italian Alps. Under a bright sun, the couple, to their sheer surprise, almost walked past the corpse of a naked human with the upper body protruding over a thick sheet of ice.

Once they reported the find to the local mountain refuge, authorities were called in, but it wasn't until four days later that rescuers freed the corpse from the thick sheet of ice and flew it in a helicopter to an Austrian village called Vent. The corpse was then placed in a wooden coffin and transported to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck.

What followed thereafter has been a saga of painstaking research and eye-opening discoveries over a course of three decades. It turned out that the corpse, discovered close to the Austrian-Italian border, was of Ötzi the Iceman, a name given by scientists to a man living approximately 5,300 years ago, or close to 3,300 BC when civilisation was slowly shifting from the stone age to the copper age.

Thirty-five years have passed since the Simons discovered Ötzi's corpse, and now we know with close certainty what was Ötzi doing so high up in the mountains, what he ate, the weapons and tools he carried and most importantly, how he died.

As subsequent investigations, including a CT scan, revealed, Ötzi was tragically shot in the back of his shoulder with an arrow from a distance of about 30 metres, or 100 feet. The arrow pierced the subclavian artery, leading to his quick death soon after due to loss of blood. When he was shot, Ötzi carried an innovative copper axe alongside stone tools and a bow and arrow. The fact that the bow remained unused made it clear that he had been taken by surprise.

Further examination of Ötzi's corpse revealed that when he died, he was about 46 years old, a fair achievement in those times, and lived a hard life. He had a broken nose and fractured ribs and significant wear and tear of joints around his hips, shoulders, knees and spine - indications of frequent fights and travels. Ötzi's body is now preserved in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, and receives a fair share of curious visitors.

Ötzi's axe preserved at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

Scientists and officials who investigated Ötzi's body and the circumstances of his death, including Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Horn from the Munich Police Department who was contacted by the South Tyrol Museum's director Angelika Fleckinger, found that Ötzi engaged in a hand-to-hand fight with someone a day before he was shot. He probably won the fight, evidenced by a single defensive wound in his right hand.

"What we think… is that the killing up on the glacier is probably the continuation of this fight that happened about one-and-a-half days before," detective Horn told BBC. "I don't like the fact that we have an unsolved homicide there." As it stands, Ötzi's murder is now officially the oldest unsolved crime in human history.

What amazed investigators was that Ötzi's killer did not take any of his possessions, indicating that the killing was personal and not driven by greed. Was Ötzi fleeing high up in the mountains or did the killer secretly pursue him after losing the previous fight? Investigators believe the latter was the case.

The fact that a mummy stayed frozen in ice for more than five thousand years only to be discovered when human civilisation had advanced enough to apply the full weight of its scientific and forensic capabilities to find who he was and how he was killed is possibly one of the most brilliant scientific strokes of luck as we see it.

Ötzi's discovery has opened up so many new avenues for human research, be it understanding what tools humans used at the time, what they ate, what they wore, where they stayed and what role they played in subsequent migrations and the advent of modern civilisation. It's strange that we know more about dinosaurs that humans that walked the planet centuries later. Ötzi the Iceman gave us a new perspective.