At the end of September 1991, a German mountaineering couple stumbled in a gutter on the Tisenjochpass near the Italian-Austrian border across the upper body of a person who protruded from the ice. It discovered Ötzi, one of the oldest and best preserved glacier mummies worldwide. Even 31 years after his find, the "man from the ice" still employs science. In a current analysis, a Norwegian-Austrian-Swiss team shows that the original explanation of how Ötzi 5,300 years could be preserved almost intact, does not withstand newer findings-and the official history of the glacier mummy must be rewritten.
The lead investigator of the find, the Austrian archaeologist Konrad Spindler, had assumed at the time that Ötzi had fled to the pass in the autumn with damaged equipment and then froze to death in the snow-free gorge where his remains were found. The body, he argued, was covered with ice and snow with the associated artifacts in the following winter and was locked under a moving glacier and preserved as if in a time capsule until its discovery in 1991.
However, the team led by Andrea Fischer, Glaziologist at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountains Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), now comes to a different result. In view of the radiocarbond data from the gutter and new glaciological knowledge to the mass balance sheet, Ötzi was not buried permanently under ice immediately after his death, but that the gutter in which he was lying was repeatedly released in the first 1500 years, Writes the team in the journal "The Holocene". Ötzi died on the snow in early spring or summer, not in autumn, and only later melted into the recess. In addition, the objects found by him were probably damaged by natural processes at the site and, as previously claimed, not, as previously claimed, during a conflict from Ötzi's escape from the valley.
"We now better understand how high-altitude ice fields influence archaeological sites and finds," said glaciologist Fischer, according to a statement from the ÖAW. As early as 1992, the excavators of the site had pointed out the possibility that the mummy and the objects had been moved by the wind and by dew and freezing processes and had been slightly damaged in the process. Fine cracks in Ötzi's skull also indicate repeated freezing and thawing cycles. "According to our findings, ice and snow finally closed off the gorge from its surroundings only about 3800 years ago," Fischer said.
Ötzi is still the most important archaeological find out of the ice, even if the number of ice age finds is now going into thousands. "The chances of finding another prehistoric human body in a similar topographical environment as on the Tisenjoch should be higher than previously assumed, since no special circumstances are required for the preservation of this type of finds," the write them Authors in the article. Due to climate change, the corresponding positions are also affected by strong melting water events - and exceptionally warm summer, like the one in 1991, no longer uncommon.
