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## September 1991: A Body in the Ice
The events that produced this genomic story began on a September afternoon in 1991, when German hikers Helmut and Erika Simon were walking between two Alpine passes — the Hauslabjoch and the Tisenjoch — in the Ötztal Alps near the border between what is now Austria and Italy.
At roughly 3,210 meters above sea level, in a rocky gully where a retreating glacier had exposed a shallow depression in the ice, they saw a human body partially sticking out of the surface. The couple assumed they had found a recently deceased mountaineer — accidents in the Alps were not uncommon — and reported the discovery to the authorities when they reached lower ground.
The initial recovery operation was neither swift nor gentle. Over the following days, multiple groups arrived at the site, including mountaineers and rescue personnel, before the body was officially extracted. The tools and equipment used in the extraction process damaged portions of the remains and severed several items of clothing and equipment from the body before the significance of the find was understood.
That significance became clear when Konrad Spindler, a University of Innsbruck archaeologist, examined the recovered body and its equipment on September 24. Looking at the copper axe among the accompanying objects, Spindler estimated the body was at least four thousand years old. Radiocarbon dating subsequently refined this estimate considerably: the man had died between approximately 3350 and 3100 BCE, making him more than five thousand years old at the time of discovery. He was, and remains, the best-preserved natural mummy of the European Copper Age ever found.