Today in History: Otzi the Iceman discovered, 1991 (French/Italian Alps)
When hikers Helmut and Erika Simon came across the frozen corpse of Otzi the Iceman in The Austro-Italian Alps on Sept. 19, 1991, they surely did not realize the historic chain of events their discovery would set off.
At first, the couple thought they had just stumbled upon an unfortunate fellow mountaineer who had recently suffered a fatal accident. However, the Austrian police who were called to the scene soon realized they were dealing with a unique situation.
Over the next three days, a small team of archaeologists extracted the long-frozen body and brought it to the office of a medical examiner in Innsbruck, Austria, where they determined that the body was at least 4,000 years old.
It was later confirmed that “Otzi the Iceman” (as he was dubbed by an Austrian journalist in reference to the site of his discovery in the Ötztal valley Alps), had died sometime between 3350 and 3100 B.C., making him, at about 5,300 years old, the oldest preserved human being ever found.
What made this find so remarkable was that, unlike Egyptian and Incan mummies desiccated by desert climates, Otzi was a “wet” mummy: in a perfect preservation combination, the glacier he died on froze his body, while the humidity in the ice preserved his organs and skin pretty much intact for several millennia.
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