35 years after the discovery: A search for clues at Ötzi's crime scene

It takes us an hour and a half to climb from the Similaunhütte to the place where Ötzi was found exactly 35 years ago. The hut landlord, Markus Pirpamer, is said to have only needed forty minutes to complete the route, although the path over the spectacular rocky ridge was not as extensively secured with steel cables and metal steps as it is today.

But Pirpamer knew the route like the back of his hand. His family has lived in the mountain village of Vent in the outermost Ötztal since the Middle Ages; his father Alois was a legendary mountain guide. Markus Pirpamer was also in a hurry. The afternoon of September 19, 1991 was already late when a couple from Nuremberg appeared in their kitchen and told them that there was a dead man sticking out of the ice at the top of the Tisenjoch.

The man was murdered, as we now know. The perpetrator may have been known to the victim, as a stone arrowhead in the dead man's shoulder belongs to the same archaeological culture as the copper blade of the ax that was found on him. The crime took place in the late Neolithic period. This makes Ötzi a permanent prehistoric sensation. In the past twelve months, six new specialist publications have been published about his case.

We want to go to the crime scene today. But as we get closer to him, the Ötzi case falls out of sight. The wonderful rock - a gneiss, more precisely: paragneiss -, the effort of the climb, the coolness of the morning. All of this is in front of all the pictures from the media and specialist articles or the diorama with the find situation on a one-to-one scale, which has recently been shown in the “Ötzi Village”, an archaeological park in Umhausen. We had visited it just two days before. Then we drove to Vent, from where a gently ascending hiking trail leads between alpine meadows and glacier remnants to the Similaunhütte.

The path from the hut to the site is much rougher. It requires a certain surefootedness, but at the same time an enormous panorama comes to the fore. The Similaunhütte, at 3,019 meters high, and the Tisenjoch at 3,210 meters are located exactly on the main Alpine ridge and the border between Tyrol and South Tyrol. In the south, the Ortler Group dominates the horizon with great majesty, and in the northeast you can sometimes see as far as the Stubai Alps. You can't get more high mountains.

That's why Erika and Helmut Simon came here from Nuremberg in September 1991, then 50 and 53 years old and passionate mountain hikers. In late summer weather that was as good as today, they climbed the Finailspitze and got off the path on the way back to the Similaunhütte. They reached the Tisenjoch about 30 meters off the marked path and came to an elongated hollow filled with thawing ice. At one point it had exposed the top of a stone and, on top of it, the bare back and the bald back of a person's head.

Markus Pirpamer initially assumed that a mountaineer had had an accident. It wouldn't have been the first that summer. In August 1991, shrinking ice masses in the Stubai region revealed the remains of five people. One had fallen into a crevasse ten years earlier, the others in 1953 and 1934. Now one on the Tisenjoch, thought the police and mountain rescue. It was only days later, when Ötzi was already lying on a stainless steel table in the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck, that an archaeologist determined, based on the artifacts found with the body, that the judiciary no longer had jurisdiction here. C-14 dating now limits the time of death to between 3371 and 3101 BC.

The depth of time catches up with us again when the via ferrata ends and the “pyramid” becomes visible beyond a depression. It is more of an obelisk made of piled up mica slate, with plaques in four languages ​​commemorating the discovery of the Iceman. On the southwest side of the pyramid the terrain slopes steeply away. “It's here so that you can see it from the Tisental, from the Italian side,” explains our mountain guide Robert Ciatti, an always cheerful, wiry, deeply tanned South Tyrolean, but who makes it a point not to be addressed as “Roberto”.

The location where the Simons found the body is not identified as such. The hollow is about seventy meters from the pyramid. It is about seven meters long and three meters wide, made of rugged gneiss and littered with boulders. We finally stop in front of one. “That’s it, the mummy stone,” explains Robert. The ice cream man's head and torso had come to rest on it, above his bent left arm. We can't resist a short re-enactment of the discovery situation.

We suspect that discouraging visitors from such or perhaps even more undignified actions could be one reason why the site itself is not provided with explanatory or at least commemorative plaques. Robert has a different explanation: They don't want people digging around here to see if they can find another arrowhead or a fingernail from Ötzi, he says. However, the chances of this happening are extremely small. As early as 1992, archaeologists had turned over every stone in the rocky hollow. The remaining ice was liquefied using steam jets and the melt water was filtered so that no small discovery escaped research.

At least as interesting as his corpse was the Stone Age outdoor equipment that the man had with him, including the hatchet and a kind of backpack as well as a bow with a quiver and arrows. Like Ötzi himself, the evidence is now in the South Tyrolean Archeology Museum in Bolzano. When the significance of the find became clear, people suddenly became interested in the exact border and discovered that Ötzi was on the Italian side, even if only by 92.56 meters.

Ötzi's equipment was found within a few meters of his body - their locations are marked by red dots on the gneiss. However, experts still argue about how the things got there. Archaeologists believe that Ötzi himself placed it where it was found before his death, leaning the arch upright against a rock edge. Accordingly, that arrow hit him, whereupon he fell onto that mummy stone and bled to death there. Later the body was covered in snow, the snow turned into ice and froze everything for more than five millennia.

Glaciologists disagree. “Five thousand years ago, things on the Tisenjoch looked roughly the same as they did twenty years ago in our time,” explains Georg Kaser from the University of Innsbruck. As a result of climate change, there is currently less ice in the mountains than in Ötzi's time. According to pollen analyses, he was out and about in late spring, when the rocky hollow must have been covered in several meters of snow. So Ötzi probably died on the snow, which then thawed in the summer after his death until the body happened to lie on the mummy stone. Something similar must have happened with his equipment.

“Ötzi is not a glacier corpse”

“After that, the body was probably covered in snow again and again in the winter and lay half in the air and in the sun and half in meltwater in the summer,” says Kaser. It was not permanently sealed in ice until around 1800 BC, when the climate became cooler. But this ice only filled the hollow, it didn't move.

“Ötzi is therefore not a glacier corpse,” says forensic pathologist Oliver Peschel. Together with Alexander Horn from the Munich Police Headquarters, he examined Ötzi's death from the perspective of modern criminology, and together with an archaeologist, the two of them turned it into the book "Cold Case Ötzi". “Glacier corpses usually turn into tangles of bones and remnants of soft tissue and clothing as a result of the ice movement,” says Peschel. Ötzi, on the other hand, remained whole and also showed tissue changes like those of a water corpse. “It must have actually been in water from time to time,” says Peschel. “Together with the cold and the drying out in the air-permeable snow in winter, this explains the special type of preservation.”

Investigations in the area difficult

Of course, Peschel and Horn cannot conclusively clarify who killed Ötzi and why. However, evidence such as a cut on his hand suggests that Ötzi was able to fend off the attack with a stabbing weapon a few days before his death, was then followed up here, thought he was safe in the small depression, but was then surprised. From about thirty meters away someone shot an arrow at him. It hit him in the shoulder and damaged an artery, causing him to bleed to death. Further conclusions are difficult, says Alexander Horn. “In addition to the corpse and the crime scene, we would also need interviews in the victim’s environment.”

Archaeologists can at least say so much about this environment that Ötzi came from the south, where we are now descending. Our path first leads back to the Similaunhütte and from there through all vegetation zones, across marmot meadows, past cattle with bells and a magical little larch forest to the Tisenhof near Vernagt in the Senales Valley. Ötzi may have initially taken a similar route up - only without the cows and sheep, as alpine farming did not exist here until the Middle Bronze Age at the earliest. Ötzi was certainly not a shepherd.

Higher up, however, he probably took a different route up than we did down, probably a little further west, directly to the Tisenjoch via boulders and snowfields. At the latest in the Vernagged Lärchenidyll we ask ourselves again who or what exactly drove the man up there back then, and during our stay in the friendly Senales Valley we often think of him later. Certainly, that yoke had already been a frequent Alpine crossing in the Neolithic period. But alone, on the run, with a battle wound on his hand and at a time of year that is still more winter here than summer?

Ötzi's last hike up the Tisenjoch must have been a great hardship. And yet, looking at this landscape, one wonders whether he didn't also have moments there when he enjoyed it.