Ötzi the Iceman: What a 5,300-Year-Old Man Carried, Ate and Died Of

On 19 September 1991, Erika and Helmut Simon were walking near Tisenjoch, above the Schnalstal valley, which Italian speakers call Val Senales. They saw a human body sticking out of the melting ice. The museum's account of how he was found notes that the body was at first treated as the remains of a recent mountaineer, someone who had died on the mountain in modern times. It took a while for anyone to understand how old he really was.

The spot where he lay matters for another reason. It is on the Italian side of the border between Italy and Austria, by just 92.56 metres. That is why Ötzi is cared for in South Tyrol, Italy.

The museum describes Ötzi as a Copper Age glacier mummy about 5,300 years old. A glacier mummy is a body preserved naturally by ice and cold, with no embalming. Scientists dated him with accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dating, a method that counts the radioactive carbon left in once-living material. The results place his remains broadly between about 3350 and 3100 BCE, and later calibrations narrow that down within the same range.

Ötzi's own kit shows what the Copper Age means in practice: he carried a copper axe alongside a flint dagger and flint-tipped arrows. If you want to know more about how bones and bodies are dated, our story on how old bones are covers radiocarbon dating in plain terms.

Ötzi was shot in the back with a flint-tipped arrow. For years after he was found, nobody knew. Then, in 2001, an X-ray showed a flint arrowhead lodged beneath his left shoulder, with the entry wound in his back. Gostner and Egarter-Vigl described the arrow injury in a 2002 radiological report. In 2007, Pernter and colleagues used CT scans to show that the arrow had damaged the left subclavian artery, a large blood vessel below the collarbone, and concluded that he died of severe blood loss, which doctors call hemorrhagic shock.

The museum presents the arrow wound as the main cause of death. It also records a severe head injury, which may have come from a blow or from a fall.

On how quickly he died, scientists do not agree. Earlier interpretations treated the arrow wound as fatal within a short time. Ramm and colleagues reported evidence from blood clots suggesting that Ötzi may have survived the wound for a while. In 2025, a clinical reassessment by Weber, Wahl, Samadelli and Zink argued that heavy external bleeding was unlikely and that he may have lived for several hours. The same team questioned whether the head injury was an injury at all, because the features in the skull and brain could reflect changes from mummification rather than a blow.

So, everyone agrees he was shot from behind with an arrow and that it played a central part in his death. What is still argued over is how fast he died and whether the head injury was real.

Ötzi has 61 tattoos, and nobody knows for certain what they meant. They are simple marks, lines and small crosses, on his ribcage, lower back, wrist, knee, calves and ankles. According to the museum, they were made by cutting fine incisions into the skin and rubbing powdered charcoal into them. Many sit where clothing would have hidden them.

Their placement is the main clue. Many of the tattoos lie over joints and over parts of the body where Ötzi had wear and probably pain, such as his lower back and knees. That supports the idea that they had a therapeutic use, a kind of treatment for aches. The museum treats this as a hypothesis, a reasonable idea that has not been proven.

People often ask whether Ötzi's tattoos prove that acupuncture existed in Europe long before it was recorded in China. The tattoos' link to sore spots is suggestive, but the therapeutic reading is still a hypothesis, and nothing more than that is established. For anyone interested in the long history of marking the skin, they are a good place to start. Our pages on skeleton tattoo meaning and skull tattoo meaning pick up the story thousands of years later.

Ötzi's clothes survived with him, which is rare for someone so old. The museum's clothing collection shows an outfit made from hide, leather and braided grass, sewn together with animal sinew, grass fibres and tree bast, the fibrous inner bark of trees.

He wore a coat made from goatskin and sheepskin, leggings of goatskin and a sheepskin loincloth. A leather belt held a pouch. His shoes were insulated and padded with grass, and on his head he wore a bearskin cap. There was no woven wool or textile clothing among his things. A woven grass object that was once described as a cape is now read more cautiously as a rain mat or part of a backpack.

It is a full set of mountain clothing from more than 5,000 years ago, made from what the animals and plants of the Alps could supply.

Ötzi's equipment is one of the reasons he is famous. The museum's equipment pages list a copper axe with a blade of 99.7 percent pure copper set in a handle, or haft, of yew wood. Analysis linked the copper to ore associated with southern Tuscany, far from the Alps where he died. People ask why he was carrying a copper axe. The axe does not answer that directly, but it does show that the copper in his hands had come a long way to reach him.

He also carried a flint dagger and an unfinished yew bow. He had a quiver made of deer hide, with arrows, and birch-bark containers. There was a retoucher, a tool for sharpening flint, a frame from a backpack and materials for making fire.

Put together, it is the kit of someone equipped to travel, hunt, mend his tools and keep warm in the mountains, which fits what scientists learned from his stomach.

Ötzi's last meal was rich in fat: ibex meat and fat, red deer, einkorn wheat and traces of bracken fern. In 2018, Frank Maixner and colleagues at Eurac Research published a detailed study of his stomach contents. They combined microscopy, ancient DNA, proteins and lipids, the fats in the food. DNA helped identify the animals, and the other tests rebuilt what the meal was made of.

The lipids showed that ibex supplied both meat and a large amount of fat. The meal was unusually high in energy, which is consistent with someone making a hard trek at high altitude. People ask why Ötzi went so high into the mountains, and this is the closest the evidence comes to an answer: he had eaten like a person preparing for, or in the middle of, strenuous travel. The researchers also concluded that the meat was probably fresh or dried and had not been heated above about 60 °C.

An earlier study, published in 2002 by Rollo and colleagues, looked at food further along his intestines. It identified an earlier meal of ibex, plants and cereals, followed by a meal of red deer and possibly cereals. The two studies fit together. The 2002 work sampled food from earlier in his digestion, and the 2018 work looked at what was still in his stomach when he died.

Ötzi is at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where he has been on display, together with his clothing and equipment, since 1998. The permanent exhibition fills three floors. It shows the mummy, his original equipment and clothing, the world of the Copper Age, the medical research on his body and a life-sized reconstruction of how he may have looked in life.

The museum keeps his body in conditions close to the glacier that preserved him. He lies in a specially designed refrigerated chamber at about -6 °C and 99 percent relative humidity, and the temperature, humidity and other conditions are monitored all the time. Visitors see him through a small window into the cold cell, and nobody walks into the chamber to view him. If you plan to visit, check opening hours and tickets on the museum's own site.

The questions people ask most about Ötzi, answered briefly.

Ötzi belongs with the other people whose bodies were preserved by nature or by care. The bog bodies of northern Europe were kept by cold peat, the Chinchorro mummies of Chile and the mummies of Guanajuato in Mexico each have their own story, and the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by a volcano. To see how faces like Ötzi's reconstruction are rebuilt from a skull, read our story on facial reconstruction, and for what bones alone can reveal, see what bones tell archaeologists.