Ötzi The Iceman: The Ancient Murder Victim Found In The European Alps
Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty ImagesÖtzi’s body was so well-preserved that he looked like a mountaineer who died in modern times.
On September 19, 1991, two German hikers named Helmut and Erika Simon were trekking through the Austro-Italian Alps when they found a corpse in the ice. They alerted Austrian rescue workers, who believed the body belonged to a mountaineer who had died recently. A series of careless excavation procedures then led to some damage to the corpse.
But medical experts in Austria eventually realized the rescue workers’ error. As it turned out, the corpse was quite far from recently deceased. Ötzi the Iceman, as he came to be known, was actually a 5,300-year-old Neolithic man — one of the oldest preserved bodies in history.
While most mummies are preserved by drying out the corpse in some way and secluding it from environmental factors, Ötzi is considered a “wet” mummy. His body was perfectly preserved, frozen in the ice, and the humidity of the glacier kept his organs and skin intact.
The strange, immaculate preservation allowed researchers to essentially perform a modern autopsy on Ötzi. This offered significant insight into what the man’s life had been like way back in the Copper Age.
Paul Hanny/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesGerman tourists Helmut and Erika Simon had found Ötzi with his head and shoulders protruding from the ice.
They were able to determine that Ötzi was in his 40s when he died, that he had weighed roughly 110 pounds, and that he stood about five feet, three inches tall, according to Live Science. He had intestinal parasites, stomach ulcers, and arthritis, and he might have been lactose intolerant.
Ötzi shared a genetic affinity with people who came from the Mediterranean islands of Sardinia and Corsica. He also had 61 tattoos, made by rubbing charcoal into small cuts across the surface of his skin.
But while researchers have gained a wealth of information from studying Ötzi’s body, the question of how, exactly, he died still remains somewhat of a mystery. Many believe that he was murdered — because there was an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder. His belongings hadn’t been taken, suggesting this murder may have been of a personal nature.
Of course, there’s no way of knowing for sure, given that any witnesses or suspects have been dead for well over 5,000 years.
Today, Ötzi is stored in a freezer at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where countless people remain in awe of his remains.
The Egtved Girl: The “Bronze Age Bride” Who Was Buried In A Peat Bog In Denmark
The National Museum of DenmarkThe Egtved Girl’s final resting place, an oak coffin that was uncovered near the village of Egtved in Denmark.
In 1921, researchers at an archaeological site near Egtved in Denmark unearthed the ancient remains of a teenage girl within a burial mound of thick peat bog. The remains, which dated back to 1370 B.C.E., were buried with an ox hide and a woolen blanket in an oak coffin.
But according to Ancient Origins, although the blanket held the girl’s shape, much of her actual body was gone. However, certain body parts had been preserved very well, including her fingernails, hair, and scalp.
This strange and eerie preservation, scientists said, is the result of a microclimate caused by the region’s soil. As rainwater seeped into the hollowed-out oak coffin, it created an oxygen-starved environment that, over the course of several centuries, decayed her bones entirely.
Still, the finding caused quite a stir in Denmark in the 1920s, and the ancient teen soon came to be known as the “Egtved Girl.”
Also buried with her were the ashes and bones of a young child, believed to be around five or six. But no identity has been attached to them, leaving the child’s relationship to the Egtved Girl somewhat of a mystery.
Among the clothing items that remained were a large, bronze belt disc, bronze pins, and a hair net. Local flowers rested on top of the coffin alongside a small bucket of beer made from honey, wheat, and cowberries.
The National Museum of DenmarkThe Egtved Girl was believed to have been slender, blonde, and of high social status.
Then, in 2015, researchers studying the girl’s remains made a remarkable discovery: The girl wasn’t from the Denmark region at all.
New information revealed that the girl — who, at an age between 16 and 18, would have likely been considered a woman in her time — may have actually hailed from the Black Forest of modern-day Germany. She probably traveled between the Black Forest region and the Egtved region in her final years.
Now known as a “Bronze Age bride,” the girl was likely sent to the Egtved region to marry a chieftain there, according to Archaeology Magazine.
This may also offer some insight into the identity of the child buried with her.
As Kristian Kristiansen of the University of Gothenburg explained, “Dynastic marriages were often followed by an exchange of ‘foster brothers’ to secure the alliance.” The ashes of the child, then, would have either belonged to a boy from the Black Forest region or from the Egtved region, who was meant to be exchanged with a different boy from the other tribe.
