The 5 000 Year Old Ice Discovery That Changed History Ötzi The Iceman

The Bolzano Museum, northern Italy. Inside a frozen tomb lies the body of a man. Recovered from an icy alpine glacier, his remarkably preserved remains hint at a violent death, a mysterious wound to his left shoulder, and on his right hand, an unexplained injury. How did this ice man die? And who or what killed him? Mummies, time travelers from the past. Where did they come from? And how did they die? All will give up their secrets to Mummies Alive. September 19, 1991. High on the icy ridges of the South Tyrol Mountains in northern Italy, hikers Erica and Helmut Simon decided to take a shortcut down from the peak. As they passed a rocky gully, they made a grisly discovery. Jutting from the ice, the head and bare shoulders of a human corpse. His left arm twisted under his body, leathery skin still covering his bones. The mummy was found here, close to the Austrian and Italian border. What was he doing alone so high up? And why had no one reported him missing? Police and mountain rescue teams had no idea what they were dealing with. Up here, there was no video surveillance, no witnesses to help the police piece together the last hours of this victim's life. Even the police or the forensic doctor came first to the place. He said, well, I can tell you who this is. I haven't found any passport, any items that could identify him. All they could do was collect the evidence. The corpse was lying on a rock, face down. As the body was pried from his icy tomb, the team began to uncover more than just human remains. In the deathly grip of his right hand, a flint-bladed dagger. And on his right foot, what appears to be the remains of a very strange shoe. Analysis revealed that when he died, he was in his mid-40s. But how long had this Iceman been lying on the mountain? The carbon dating unlocked the shocking truth. The result was 5,300 years. So this mummy is more than 5,000 years old. Piecing together the details of this Iceman's life is going to be a challenge. He walked the earth nearly 1,000 years before the Great Pyramids were built. The last populations of woolly mammoths still roamed in Siberia. And the invention of the wheel was still a century away. He's one of the oldest preserved corpses on the planet. Frozen in time, locked in ice for thousands of years. The Iceman was given a name, Otzi, after the Otzol mountain range where his remains were found. He lived in a period known as the Neolithic, a time of great change. Farming settlements were just taking hold. For Otzi, hunting was probably still a major source of food. But the nature of his death remained a mystery. With no clues and no firm leads, the investigation recorded cause of death as hypothermia. The theory was that he just went up there even just by chance or maybe he took the wrong way. Then he died of exhaustion and because of the cold weather and so on. Otzi froze at 11,000 feet, nearly 4,000 meters on a desolate icy ridge. Challenging that theory is archeologist Dr. Francis Pryor, a specialist in Neolithic life. Otzi's death has always fascinated me. He was above the tree line in the snow. It seems to me that there is something very odd about Otzi's death. In the lab, mummy expert and biologist, Professor Albert Zink, has spent 20 years trying to get to the truth. Yeah, it's fascinating what you can get out of a mummy because it's a biological tissue and it keeps all this information preserved that we still can read it after all these years. The casebook is reopening. Did Otzi really freeze to death high on a mountain glacier? Why was he dead? Are there any other clues that we can find? Looking at Otzi is forensic pathologist, Dr. Richard Shepard. He has more than two decades experience investigating suspicious deaths. Now we know that he was about five foot two inches in height, 160 centimeters. He was said to weigh about 50 kilograms, 110 pounds, which is quite light for nowadays. And his body build I'd describe as sort of relatively slim but possibly muscular. When we look at his knees, we can see that the gap between the tibia and the fibula here is quite wide on the outer side, but is non-existent on the inner side. Those two bones are now touching. There's no protection between the two. And that's a painful disease called arthritis. Typical of someone who spent his life at high altitude up in the mountains being physically active. Further evidence of the ice man suffering from joint pain may lie in his collection of 61 tattoos. They chiefly cluster around the lower back and joints. Prevailing theories suggest the process of tattooing may in itself have been therapeutic treatment. But despite his aches and pains, Otzi was an active man, a mountain man, and he was equipped to survive. Pulled from the ice with him, a warm bearskin cap and thick goatskin leggings, the oldest of their kind in the world, and surprisingly high-tech snow boots with layers of hay for insulation and a diagonal leather strip on the sole designed to give grip on the snow and ice. But Francis Pryor is convinced Otzi used more than just fur and skin to stay alive. A birch bark container found near the body might offer clues. The inside is charred black and it was filled with dozens of maple leaves. If this is a piece of ingenious Neolithic technology, how does it work? Francis Pryor is meeting with alpine mountain survival expert Ernst Gamper to find out more. If Otzi was to stay alive, he needed total control over one of the most important elements in the development of human civilization, fire. The Neolithic was the period that people learned to control fire. And the command of fire is an essential part of Neolithic life. Francis Pryor thinks he knows how Otzi used his container. It was an inventive way of carrying fire. And the mysterious maple leaves were a key ingredient used as insulation for red-hot embers. When this was found, a lot of archaeologists thought, no, those maple leaves wouldn't work as insulation. But as you can see, when they're green, they're still very moist. And it does act as an effective insulation and stores the heat. Did Otzi carry fire into the mountains? We may well discover that this little birch bark box was the only thing that enabled Otzi and people like him to go up beyond the snow line. This is their survival kit. It's the equivalent of an oxygen cylinder to a modern mountaineer. Otzi made the tough climb to 11,000 feet. If Francis can make a fire from the wrapped embers, it's possible Otzi did too. It's effective. Yeah, I'm extremely pleased. I mean, it is possible to carry fire. I mean, that's what this is demonstrating. So you've got the flint producing the fire. You've got the woodworking producing the kindling. You've got the birch bark. You've got all sorts of different technology coming together to do one basic thing, which is produce fire high up in the Alps. Otzi's skill in transporting fire shows us that Neolithic man had the technology to survive the extreme conditions of mountain life. It may explain how he was able to climb so high. But though he may have been warm, it did not mean he was safe. What would force him to venture so high on the mountain? Otzi's got an injury here typical of defending himself against an attack. Perhaps this was no routine hunting trip for Otzi, and he was forced onto a frozen mountain ridge. Otzi, a 5,300-year-old body removed from his icy tomb. Original investigations concluded that this ice man froze to death, but Francis Pryor thinks this verdict is highly suspicious. If he can trace Otzi's final footsteps, they may reveal clues as to how he came to die high up on a remote icy glacier. But the trail has long gone cold. Tracing the last hours of a 5,000-year-old corpse seems impossible. But unlike most mummies, Otzi is almost entirely intact. His remains are so well-preserved, even his stomach contents survive. It gives biologist Professor Albert Zink a seed of an idea that'll help Francis Pryor track Otzi's every move on the mountain. By mapping the different pollen in different parts of his gut, you can then calculate where you have been in the last maybe 30 hours. As Otzi spends his final hours on the mountain, he moves through different terrains. The air is filled with microscopic pollen spores. Like a human fingerprint, each species is unique. As Otzi eats, drinks, and even breathes, he's unwittingly absorbing the different pollens. For Albert Zink, Otzi's gut is like a biological GPS. Food takes around 33 hours to pass through the body. By examining the pollen at the very end of his gut, Albert Zink can pinpoint exactly where Otzi begins his journey. The first sample was actually taken at the final part of the colon, and here the pollen was composed mainly of pine pollen. And this shows us that he must have climbed up to and height about 2,200 meters. Pine thrives at high altitudes, up to around 7,000 feet, about 2,000 meters. It places Otzi here, on the edge of the tree line. The oldest pollen in Otzi's gut came from up here. This really is no man's land. This area of the mountain is prime grazing land. Ibex and goats would feed on its steep slopes. Hunting was a big part of Neolithic life. Could Otzi have been up here gathering food? The pollen records definitely show the Iceman had a meal, maybe meat from a kill. One thing we do know for sure, in 33 hours time, Otzi would be dead. So where did Otzi go next? Albert Zink identifies more pollen from halfway through the Iceman's gut. It reveals Otzi went down the mountain to the lower slopes of the valley. This could put him in his village 12 hours before his death. The exact location of Otzi's home is not known. So archeologists have recreated a Neolithic village to reveal the kind of life he might have led. Up there, over the snow line, is where they found Otzi's body. And you've got to imagine, 5,000 years ago, Otzi might well have stood up and looked down here to a settlement like this where we know he came from. Now, Neolithic villages represent the beginnings of organized life. 5,000 years ago, humans begin to settle in communities. They farm the land and keep livestock. Otzi lives in a period of revolutionary change, at the birth of the modern world. Now, as you can see, it's a proper house. It's been well laid out. Seating areas around the edge of the house so that you're away from the full heat of the fire. Very often, you find animal fat spattered around the edge of the fireplace. And this smoke that's coming up here would have gone up into the root space. And then on its way up here, for example, you can see there's some dried jerky, perhaps. So people lived rich lives. That's the point. They didn't just live hand to mouth. Otzi wasn't a nomad. So why leave his settlement behind and climb high onto an icy glacier and die? Was there a more uneasy side to Otzi's village life? As life becomes more settled, inevitably, you see a rise in tension. And it's something that would have been made worse by the steady population growth. Otzi may have had enemies. Found with his body was an armory of weapons, a longbow and quiver complete with arrows, an ax lay on a nearby stone, and a dagger. Its ash wood handle attached to a triangular blade bound with animal sinews. Could this knife have been more than just a hunting tool? Dr. Shepherd has found forensic evidence that backs this up. Looking at Otzi's body, there's one thing that caught my eye. He's got a cut that sits in the web between his finger and his thumb, just here. At a higher power, we can see it's quite a deep cut into the tissues. And its position at that point tells me that it's a defensive injury. And a defensive injury is one that's caused when the victim grabs hold of a knife that's been wielded by the assailant. They do it in desperation. And as the knife is pulled through, the cut is formed in that place on the hand. And this injury on his hand, although it's relatively minor, tells me a very important part, that Otzi was being attacked by someone with a knife at some time very close to his death. Is this cut the result of a fight in Otzi's village? Is he a man on the run, climbing high into the mountains in a desperate attempt to escape his enemies, only to suffer a mysterious, violent death? Otzi, the mummified remains of a 5,300-year-old man. Once thought to have frozen to death, his body is giving up its secrets. Evidence of violence, including a nasty knife slash to the web of his hand. Archaeologist Francis Pryor is following a trail of clues. He knows Otzi had a meal in his village 12 hours before his death at the top of the mountain. Otzi left the village. He climbed back up the hillside, up to the tree line, but this time he didn't stop. He continued up and up and up and up to 11,000 feet. That's 3,500 meters, but he never came back. What happened on the remote glacier that led to Otzi's death? A forensic CT scan of his body suggests something new. Dr. Richard Shepherd is having a closer look at Otzi's skin. He finds something mysterious on the ice man's left shoulder. We can see an entry wound on his back. Dr. Shepherd targets Otzi's upper torso, peeling back the layers so he can see deep inside the body. As we look at the visualization of the CT scan, we can see at the back the collarbone, and it's quite clear from looking at this that it's an arrowhead in his body. Still embedded after more than 5,000 years is what looks like a Neolithic arrowhead. As the arrow entered his body, it's tracked through the back of the shoulder blade, which is a very thin sheet of bone, and it's then penetrated between the ribs. Otzi's clearly been shot, but who was his killer and why pursue him 11,000 feet up an icy mountain? At Otzi's discovery site, his body lay on a flat stone. Close by were his possessions, including an armory of weapons, a longbow, and a quiver loaded with arrows. Whoever shot Otzi probably carried the same. The longbow, invented in the Neolithic, was the main distance-killing weapon throughout prehistory. It was lethal, it was effective, and it was accurate. It's a bow with an arrow like this that ripped through Otzi's flesh. But could this weapon have killed him? Neolithic bows were incredibly technically advanced and sophisticated. For a start, the wood they were made from was nearly always yew wood. It has immense strength. These things were the tank-busters of their time. They were lethally effective. Combine the power of the Neolithic bow with a razor-sharp flint, and Otzi's assailant commanded a lethal weapon. Flint is a particularly good material for making arrowheads. This is identical to arrows that were found in Otzi's quiver. This is the bit that would have fitted into the arrow shaft, and then the thing was bound around with fibre or leather, and the result is something which is really quite strong. So this is a missile, something which would have been absolutely lethal to deer, to game, and, of course, to poor Otzi. If Otzi was caught in the sights of the killer's longbow, then there was little chance he would survive. But was he on the run when he was shot? The wound to his hand, possibly from a fight in his village, suggests he knew he might be in danger. Professor Albert Zink has one more stomach sample to examine. He's not so sure Otzi was fleeing for his life. Yeah, if you look at this piece, you can really see that there's several little fibres. You can see now perfectly here that these are meat fibres, deer or ibex. So now we are sure that his last meal was mainly composed of meat, and the stomach was full with material. Albert Zink knows Otzi eats his last meal high on the mountain just half an hour before his death. Not the actions of a man on the run. Things aren't adding up. Otzi's mummified remains were recovered with an armory of weapons, including this valuable axe. So why didn't he use them to defend himself? And why didn't his killer take them? In the Iceman mystery, the clues are stacking up. A slash to his right hand. It looks like Otzi has been in a fight. And now, only with the aid of modern forensics, can we reveal the full extent of the damage caused by the flint arrowhead shot into his body. Whoever shot that arrow into Otzi couldn't have been very far away. And they obviously knew what they were doing because it was a lethal shot. And the arrowhead has created another mystery. Where is the arrow shaft? Moved it from Otzi's left shoulder. And what of Otzi's own weapons? His rare copper axe. And his flint knife. When he was attacked, why didn't he use them to defend himself? Looking at Otzi's body, he's lying on what seems like the only large rock. And the quiver of arrows is on a limestone slab. Seems to have been put there. This doesn't look like the aftermath of someone killing them with an arrow. This doesn't look like a skirmish or a robbery. Nearby is a longbow, propped up against a rock. It also seems to have been placed there. On the original, you can still see the maker's cuts. But strangely, there is no sign of the bowstring or any way of attaching it. For Francis Pryor, this is a major clue about the motive for the killing. We don't think it was finished. For example, at the ends here, you would normally have a string would loop over this bit, and there'd be a notch on either side of this end and on either side of the other. And there's no sign of them. This, I think, is either an unfinished bow or just as likely, and this is something no one's mentioned before, but it could be a symbolic bow. It could be a representation of a bow. It looks like a bow, but it isn't a bow. And Otzi's armory contained more unfinished weapons. Only two of his 14 arrows were fitted with lethal flint heads. Francis Pryor shifts the direction of his investigation. He thinks Otzi's slaughter may have more to do with the location of the body than the crime scene itself. Otzi was found in a place where the landscape suddenly changes. These areas are known as liminal zones and are associated throughout history with human sacrifice. He was found in a liminal zone. He was above the tree line in the snow, and that's where we do find sacrificial victims. From the dark pools of ancient peat bogs to frozen mountains at the heart of mighty empires, humans of all ages and social rank have been chosen as the ultimate sacrifice, valuable offerings to wrathful gods. Did Otzi meet a similar end and become a human sacrifice on an icy glacier? Francis Pryor believes there is one more piece of vital evidence, which will support his sacrificial theory. Near the bow, lying on a stone slab, was one of the most precious archeological finds ever made, Otzi's copper ax. The radiocarbon dates for Otzi came through, and there could be absolutely no arguing with them. This ax was 3300 BC, which shoved the appearance of copper back a full half millennium. Otzi's copper ax rewrites the history books, pushing the copper age back 500 years. Making this ax required enormous skill. In order to make copper, you've got to get temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees centigrade. It's all about the control of heat. That is the key thing. Francis Pryor believes the ax is another clue supporting his idea that Otzi was a victim of ritual sacrifice. Smelting and casting copper over 5000 years ago was seen as almost magical, a rare skill. This Neolithic ax was a diamond jewel of its day. Was it, like Otzi, a sacrificial gift to the gods? Had that been a vendetta, had that been a robbery, had that been a casual killing, you would not walk off and leave something as incredibly valuable as a copper ax lying there. Francis Pryor's ritual killing theory is controversial and relies on one important piece of evidence, that Otzi's ax and bow are precisely laid out before the execution. But how can he be sure that after 5,300 years, this evidence of sacrifice hasn't been tampered with? Perhaps the answer to this question can be found in the way Otzi was mummified. Egyptian mummies like these were preserved with the help of embalmers. But Otzi's preservation is not the work of human hands. His mummification was the result of snow and ice. Dr. Richard Shepard is examining images from the discovery site. If a body is cooled rapidly after death, decomposition never takes place. So Otzi and his ice tomb is effectively freeze-dried. Otzi's extraordinary preservation was down to a unique set of circumstances, the perfect storm of mummification. Fresh snow rapidly covered his remains and super dry mountain air desiccated his corpse. Soon after, he froze, entombed in a block of solid ice. Otzi became a mummy. And his ritually arranged possessions are locked in place with him. Francis Pryor's theory that Otzi is an offering to his gods seems plausible. But Dr. Richard Shepard is not so sure Otzi is a willing victim. By studying the path the arrowhead took through Otzi's body, Dr. Shepard makes a surprising discovery about the location of the killer. When we look at the angle of any wound, it gives us a clue as to the direction, the force that struck the body. And that's the same with bullets as it is with arrows. We can look at the position of the arrow in the body and that gives us a direction that it entered the body because it's going to travel in approximately the straight line. Dr. Shepard begins to form a picture of the killing scene. It's quite clear from looking at this arrow that it's traveling upwards and forwards from the back. So the shot has come from behind Otzi and below him. The upward angle of the arrow suggests Otzi wasn't standing still when his executioner struck. So it's perfectly possible actually that he was bent forwards, running away perhaps when the arrow hit his back. A willing human sacrifice wouldn't run. Is it more likely Otzi was trying to escape from someone in his village? There's the defensive wound on his hand, made only hours before his death. Otzi escaped to the mountains, his last ever climb. I find it hard work, whereas poor old Otzi, he had a heavy old bow, his shoes weren't the greatest. What was it like for him? Can't imagine. Despite Otzi's age and arthritis, he manages to climb 11,000 feet beyond the tree line and onto a desolate glacier. He seems to have felt safe enough to eat a big meal. The stomach was full of material. But minutes later, Otzi was shot. The forensic picture of the crime scene is coming together. But Dr. Richard Shepard is not convinced that the knife slash to the hand and the arrow strike were the only injuries inflicted. The killer has one last brutal assault in mind. For over 5,000 years, the Iceman has kept his deadly secret, a mummified corpse frozen in his icy tomb. Now the truth about Otzi's death is emerging. Dr. Shepard thinks the upward angle of the arrowhead suggests Otzi may have been running and not a victim of ritual sacrifice. And Albert Zink believes he had made a deadly enemy. I'm sure that he was killed because of a kind of conflict. He had a deep cut wound on his right hand. This must have happened before he was killed. And Otzi only had one place to go. He knew this territory very well. He knew the mountains. So he went up to a place where he felt very safe. Otzi was equipped to survive high in the mountains. We can only guess what might've been going through his mind. Did he leave his family behind? Was he planning to return to his village? Whatever the truth, he was unaware his killer was tracking him like an animal. The assassin was waiting below a ridge. He had Otzi in his sights and was armed with the ultimate Neolithic weapon. He aimed. And struck with deadly accuracy. The arrow cuts through into the top of the left side of his chest. It damages some major blood vessels just beneath the collarbone here. And that would have caused immediate and quite torrential hemorrhage. Whether shot while trying to escape or as Francis Pryor believes, ritually slaughtered, one big question still remains. How long did it take Otzi to die? His final seconds have been a mystery for over 20 years. But now Albert Zink believes he's found the answer from tiny skin samples taken from around the arrow shaft entry wound. So the question was, how can we solve now the riddle about his death, whether he died immediately or not? For the first time on a mummy, Otzi went under an atomic force microscope. Targeting the entry wound, it revealed an image that had never been seen before. Otzi's 5,300 year old blood cells. But Albert Zink spots something else. A blood clotting protein called Fabrin. So when you cut yourself, the body tries to immediately react and let's say to close the wound. And the first thing the body expresses is a protein called Fabrin. This happens immediately in the first seconds of the wound reaction. The Fabrin flooded Otzi's wound. And after a while, it should have disappeared. But it didn't. And when we had a closer look, we found a lot of Fabrin. It means there was an immediate wound reaction, but no further healing going on. Otherwise the Fabrin would have disappeared. So this shows us clearly that the arrow wound was fresh and there was no healing going on. So with this analysis, we could finally show that the Eisen was killed immediately where he was found in the Alps. Otzi died where he fell, laying on a flat rock, an arrow embedded in his back. But Dr. Shepard is not convinced the killer stopped there. He's studying scans of Otzi's head. Around the back of Otzi's brain, there's a collection of blood at this point at the back of his head. And this sort of collection is known as a subdural hemorrhage, bleeding over the surface of the brain between the skull and the brain itself. And this is a marker of significant trauma to the head. And it can itself be a cause of death. He'd been shot through the back by an arrow, but he'd also been bashed on the head. Now it could be argued that he received that bash when he fell, but it's just as likely that he was bashed on the head with a rock. The arrow probably killed Otzi instantly. But to be sure, perhaps his killer finished him off. What happened next is conjecture. But like all homicides, the killer may have tried to cover his tracks. Two items could link him to the killing. Arrows are very distinctive. So the murderer pulled his incriminating arrow shaft from Otzi's back. And no matter how tempting it must have been to steal the rare copper ax, he knew possessing it would have branded him as Otzi's killer. May always remain a mystery. But like all homicide cases, his body has given up many clues, revealing his life and the brutality of his death. Today, preserving Otzi's frozen remains is a number one priority for the Bolzano Museum. His body is kept at a chilling 21 degrees Fahrenheit, and every six weeks he's sprayed with sterile water to protect his skin. The glacier that was Otzi's original tomb has shrunk by nearly a third in the last 25 years. The retreating ice could mean it's just a matter of time before more Otzi's are discovered. Yeah, I'm quite sure that with the retreat of the glaciers and of the ice, maybe there will be some more mummies showing up. I think there's still more things to learn, and I think in the future, we'll have the chance to have a closer look there. We all come at Otzi from a different perspective. And I suspect there are as many Otzi's as there are people who look at Otzi. That's the great thing about it. Otzi is an ancestor to all of us, preserved by an extraordinary chain of natural events and discovered by chance. His existence today gives us a rare and precious glimpse of our long lost past.