Twenty years since Oetzi the Iceman was found

By Katie Kahle and Klaus Tscharnke Sep 26, 2011, 13:45 GMT

Bolzano/Nuremberg - When the Simon couple first saw a body in the ice of the Oetztal Alps on the border between Austria and Italy, the significance of the grisly find had yet to become clear.

The couple from Nuremberg had kicked loose an avalanche on their way down the mountain on September 19, 1991. The face of 'Oetzi', as the glacier mummy was baptized, was on the cover of Time magazine a year later, over the title 'The Iceman's Secrets'.

Twenty years on, Oetzi has since given up several of those secrets, although others remain shrouded in mystery.

'Look at what's lying over there! That's a person,' Erika Simon recalls her husband calling out. Initially they believed the person had died at most 40 or 50 years earlier and was now being exposed by the melting glacier ice.

Simon, now 71, was not alone in her opinion. The Italian police showed little interest in recovering the body, especially as that warm summer had already exposed six other long-dead walkers previously locked in their icy graves.

It was the Austrian authorities that had the mummified corpse brought to the University in Innsbruck to investigate its origins, she told the German Press Agency dpa. At first Oetzi was thought to have been dead for around a century, as a result of the excellent state of preservation and the tattooed body's 'fresh' appearance.

Then the university scientists said he had probably lived in mediaeval times. Reinhold Messner, the famous mountaineer who hails from the region, expressed the opinion: 'Something's not quite right with this little chap.'

But forensic scientists discovered much deeper secrets than Messner could have dreamed of. The body originated in the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age. Oetzi had lived more than 5,000 years ago.

'Frozen Fritz', as some in the English-speaking world called him, became an overnight international sensation. This was the first time that body parts that normally decompose rapidly had been so well preserved over such a long timespan, and the scientists were agog.

But there were also problems. For years Austria and Italy argued over Oetzi's nationality, before he was definitively identified as an Italian. He made the journey from Innsbruck to Bolzano only in 1998, where he now resides in a special room in the Archaeological Museum, kept at minus 6 degrees Celsius and at a humidity of 98 per cent.

Legal proceedings over a reward for finding the body dragged on even longer, ending only a couple of years ago with a payment of more than 150,000 euros (210,000 dollars) in return for finding the body.

Then there were the six deaths seemingly linked to Oetzi, leading to dark rumours of a 'Curse of the Mummy'.

The original discoverer, Helmut Simon, was found dead in a mountain stream in the Austrian Alps in 2004 while early history professor Konrad Spindler, who had investigated the corpse at Innsbruck University, died at the start of 2005 at the relatively young age of 66.

But as the Bolzano museum noted, hundreds of experts have inspected Oetzi down the years, and it is scarcely surprising that some of them are no longer alive.

The scientists have uncovered a great deal of information on this Ur-Tyrolean, who died as the result of broken ribs and an arrow wound in the left shoulder, apparently while being pursued.

The place of death some 5,300 years ago was around 90 metres from the border on the Italian side. He was 47-years-old at the time, and thus very old for the times. He as wearing a fur coat, fur leggings, shoes made of cowhide and filled with grass, and a cap. And he was armed with a bow, arrows and an axe.

Some 95 per cent of his DNA has been analysed using the most up-to-date techniques. The researchers are interested in tracking down his descendants and also finding clues regarding the genetic origins of diseases common today, including diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's.

And there are plenty of questions still unanswered. For example who was he running away from and what do all his tattoos signify?