Nineteen people in Austria are descendants of Ötzi, a man who lived 5,000 years ago. How cool is that? In 1991, two hikers high in the European Alps stumbled upon a perfectly preserved corpse. Further analysis revealed the body didn’t belong to a mountaineer, but to a Copper Age hunter.
Ötzi’s body is like a time capsule. It enables us to peek 5,000 years back in history.
The surprising discovery of a 5,000-year-old mummy
In 1991, Helmut and Erika Simon, German tourists, discovered a frozen body in the glacier in the Ötztal Alps. First, they thought they had found a body of a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ mountaineer.
An autopsy revealed they had stumbled upon something truly amazing — a natural mummy of a Copper Age hunter who had lived 5,000 years ago.
The ice perfectly preserved the body. The unusually high summer temperatures in 1991 caused the ice to thaw and gave…
