Kitting Öut

On an early summer day fifty-three hundred years ago, a forty-five-year-old man was traversing a glacier high in the alpine, above ten thousand feet, on what is now the border of Austria and Italy. He was likely fleeing an attacker. A deep cut on his right hand from days prior was a defensive wound, evidence of hand-to-hand combat, probably in the valley below. There on the glacier, he was shot in the back shoulder by an arrow. The arrow severed his subclavian artery, he or his murderer pulled the shaft out, leaving the flint point embedded in his body, and he died from his injury soon after.

This was Ötzi, perhaps the world’s second-most-famous mummy (after Tutankhamen), whose body was discovered by hikers in 1991 and has been an object of fascination since then. More than six million people have visited the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, and viewed his remains, which are stored in a sealed chamber at twenty-one degrees Fahrenheit