The body was so well preserved that it was assumed that this person was the victim of a recent mountaineering accident and the incident was reported to the police.
It became clear days later that the body was actually much older than first thought.
Eventually, it was determined by radiocarbon dating that the body was approximately 5,300 years old.
This person, later known as 'Ötzi the Iceman', lived before the Egyptian pyramids were built, at a time when most people lived in small farming communities and the use of metal tools was just beginning to become widespread.
Despite this, his body was so well preserved that scientists were able to see tattoos on his skin. They were able to determine what he had for his last meal and locate the killing arrowhead in his back.
After his death, he was trapped in ice for thousands of years and emerged when the ice began to melt.
'A historical freezer'
As a result of climate change, the world is experiencing rapid loss of snow and ice.
A study last year found that glaciers, other than the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are losing about 270 billion tonnes of ice on average each year between 2000 and 2023, and that melting has accelerated in the last 10 years.
Other types of ice, such as permanent ice caps, are also melting. Unlike glaciers, these do not tend to be heavy enough to move downhill. There are also parts of ice floes that do not move, and non-moving ice is particularly good at preserving ancient ruins without crushing them.
"With the melting of glaciers in the last 20 years, thousands of remains have been revealed," says archaeologist Espen Finstad, who directs the Norway-based glacier archeology program "Secrets of the Ice".
This is a large, historic freezer and the freezer is no longer working. That's why these ruins are showing up again, and many are in as good a condition as when they were left there thousands of years ago.
A slice of daily life
Many archaeological artifacts are discovered in old burial grounds. Inventions like Ötzi are vital because they offer a slice of the daily life of an ordinary person.
“The Iceman was removed from everyday life,” says archaeologist Andreas Putzer, who works at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, Italy (where Ötzi is now).
Everything on him, including his clothing, weapons, and equipment, was preserved by being under the ice.
"For the first time, we have an idea of how people dressed during this period," Putzer says.
And Ötzi's ax was found to have come from the Tuscany region in central Italy, hundreds of kilometers from the Austrian border. This shows that the communities of that period were engaged in trade.
The Iceman's exceptionally good preservation has also enabled biological discoveries.
Genetic analysis has provided evidence for the first time in a prehistoric individual of Helicobacter Pylori, a bacterium that can cause stomach ulcers.
After scientists decoded Ötzi's genome in 2012, they determined that he likely had brown eyes, was lactose intolerant, had blood type O, suffered from age-related arthritis, and was at high risk of cardiovascular disease.
An analysis conducted in 2023 also revealed new information about Ötzi's appearance, showing that he had darker skin than previously thought and was genetically predisposed to baldness. According to Putzer, research on the Iceman is still ongoing.
a preserved forest
Thousands of kilometers away from where Ötzi was found, a very different remnant from the past emerged as the ice melted.
A research team in the Rocky Mountains of the USA has found a whitebark pine forest determined by radiocarbon dating to be more than five thousand years old.
One of the authors of the article, archaeologist Dr. from Montana State University. According to Craig Lee, the trees that had been torn from their logs and lying nearby were so well preserved that when they were first found, their wood was still yellow and "still gave off a strong pine scent."
“They were frozen in the ice, so they were motionless,” he says.
It was like a newly planted tree.
What made the discovery even more intriguing, according to Lee, was that "nothing like these trees" currently lives in the area. The fact that the trees were able to grow at this height suggests that the climate was once much warmer than it is today.
'High quality trash'
Another remarkable discovery that emerged as the ice melted was an ancient Viking passage in Norway.
"You could call it the Viking highway... they used this mountain pass as a quick and easy way to cross the mountains," says archaeologist Julian Post-Melbye of the Cultural History Museum at the University of Oslo.
According to Finstad, many items dating back "at least two thousand years" were found along the route.
These can be broadly divided into two categories. The first is transportation equipment.
"You can see the horse equipment, we found ski parts," Post-Melbye says.
You find dead draft horses and of course all the feces left over from the horses.
Similar to Ötzi's life, there are frozen and preserved fragments of ordinary people's lives.
The finds include various items, from clothing to weapons, such as gloves, shoes, children's toys, wax containers used in candle making.
“This is high-quality prehistoric garbage,” Post-Melbye jokes.
“Twenty years ago, the history of the high mountains in Norway would have been a story about mountaineering expeditions,” he says.
But thanks to all this work... we can now tell a new history that focuses on a broader segment of past societies, artisans, farmers, children, essentially families and society.
'A short period of time'
However, once such finds are removed from the ice, they face the risk of disappearing forever.
"When the artifacts on the ice melt and separate from the ice, which can take a day, the artifacts can disappear with the meltwater," says Finstad.
"Or some clothes may dry out and be blown away by the wind. So we have a short window of time to save them."
While melting ice presents an opportunity for archaeological discoveries, it also confronts researchers with the reality of a changing climate.
"If you have an organic artifact that has been preserved in ice for more than 10 thousand years and this artifact is lying on the surface of the earth, this means the disappearance of 10 thousand years of ice," Lee says.
"Towards the end of my life, when my children stand on the same mountains, there will be no glaciers and ice floes around," Post-Melbye says.
"When you work on this year after year, year after year, you get a deep sense of how great the loss is going to be."
Lee believes that because finds from ice age archaeology are limited, we need to quickly recover anything that comes to the surface.
"We have an obligation to future generations to research these areas," he says.
Finstad agrees.
"Maybe in 20 years it will be too late," he says.
"We're kind of destined to do this... If we don't, they'll be gone forever."
