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By Root 2180 0

off the mountain nearly twenty years ago, Ötzi has become the most forensically studied human being in history. Scientists could determine many of the details of his life with startling precision. With electron microscopes they could see that on the day of his death he consumed ibex and deer meat, bread made from a type of wheat called spelt, and some unidentified vegetables. From pollen grains recovered from his colon and lungs they were able to deduce that he had died in the spring and had begun the day in the valley below. By studying isotopic trace elements in his teeth, they could even work out what he had eaten as a child and therefore where he had been raised, and concluded that he had grown up in the Eisack Valley, in what is now Italy, then moved to a valley called the Vinschgau farther west near the modern border with Switzerland. The biggest surprise of all was how old he was: at least forty but possibly as much as fifty-three, making him exceedingly old for the period. But there was also much they couldn’t explain, including how he had died, and what he was doing nearly two miles above sea level at the time of his death. His bow was unstrung and only half made, and the arrows mostly had no flights, and so were useless, yet for some reason he took them with him.

Normally not many people stop at small archaeological museums in out-of-the-way provincial towns, but Bolzano’s museum is thronged with visitors throughout the year and the gift shop does a brisk trade in Ötzi keepsakes. Visitors line up to peer at him through a small window. He lies naked on his back on a glass slab. His brown skin glistens from the mist that is perpetually sprayed over him as a preservative. In fact, there is nothing innately distinctive about Ötzi. He is a completely normal, if unusually old and well-preserved, human being. What is extraordinary are his many possessions. They are the material equivalent of time travel.

In addition to the ax, knife, quiver, and arrows, Ötzi had shoes, clothing, two birchbark canisters, a sheath, a bowstave, miscellaneous small tools, some berries, a piece of ibex meat, and two spherical lumps of birch fungus, each about the size of a large walnut and carefully threaded with sinew. One of the canisters had contained glowing embers wrapped in maple leaves, for starting fires. Such an assemblage of personal effects was unique. Some of the items were, as it were, really unique in that they had never been imagined, much less seen. The birch fungus was a particular mystery because it was obviously treasured, and yet birch fungus is not known to be good for anything.

His equipment employed eighteen different types of wood—a remarkable variety. The most surprising of all his tools was the ax. It was copper-bladed and of a type known as a Remedello ax, after a site in Italy where such implements were first found. But Ötzi’s ax was hundreds of years older than the oldest Remedello ax. “It was,” in the words of one observer, “as if the tomb of a medieval warrior had yielded a modern rifle.” The ax changed the time frame for the Copper Age in Europe by no less than a thousand years.

But the real revelation and excitement were the clothes. Before Ötzi we had no idea—or, to be more precise, nothing but ideas—of how Stone Age people dressed. Such materials as survived existed only as fragments. Here was a complete outfit, and it was full of surprises. His clothes were made from the skins and furs of an impressive range of animals—red deer, bear, chamois, goat, and cattle. He also had with him a woven grass rectangle that was three feet long. This might have been a kind of rain cape, but it might equally have been a sleeping mat. Again, nothing like it had ever been seen or imagined.

Ötzi wore fur leggings held up with leather strips attached to a waist strap that made them look uncannily—almost comically—like the kind of nylon hose and garter sets that Hollywood pinups wore during the Second World War. Nobody had remotely foreseen such a getup. He wore a loincloth of goatskin and a hat made from the fur of a brown