At the end of September 1991, a pair of German mountaineers stumbled over the torso of a man sticking out of the ice in a gully on the Tisenjoch Pass near the Italian-Austrian border. It discovered Ötzi, one of the oldest and best preserved glacier mummies in the world. Even 31 years after his discovery, the “Iceman” is still occupying the scientific community. In a recent analysis, a Norwegian-Austrian-Swiss team shows that the original explanation of how Ötzi was able to survive almost intact for 5,300 years does not stand up to more recent findings – and the official history of the glacier mummy will probably have to be rewritten.
The lead investigator of the find, the Austrian archaeologist Konrad Spindler, assumed at the time that Ötzi had fled to the pass in the fall with damaged equipment and then froze to death in the snow-free gorge where his remains were found. The body, he argued, and its associated artefacts, were covered by ice and snow the following winter and sealed under a moving glacier and preserved as in a time capsule until its discovery in 1991.
However, the team led by Andrea Fischer, glaciologist at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), has come to a different conclusion. In view of the radiocarbon data from the gully and new glaciological findings on the mass balance, it is likely that Ötzi was not permanently buried under ice immediately after his death, but that the gully in which he lay was repeatedly uncovered in the first 1500 years. writes the team in the journal »The Holocene«. According to this, Ötzi died on the snow in early spring or summer, not in autumn, and only later melted into the depression. In addition, the objects found on him were probably damaged by natural processes at the site and not, as previously claimed, during a conflict before Ötzi’s escape from the valley.