Otzi melted out of a glacier on the Austrian-Italian border in September 1991, complete with his clothes, tools and an unfinished yew longbow, a Copper Age life interrupted mid-task and preserved for 5,300 years.
Bolzano's museum keeps him at glacier temperature in a small cold cell, viewable through a window barely larger than a porthole, and the effect humbles most visitors more than any painting could. The floors above lay out everything found around him: a copper axe, a fur quiver of arrows, a woven grass cape, and the tattoos still visible on his skin, mapped by researchers as possible early acupuncture points. It is the fullest picture anywhere of how one ordinary person actually lived, worked and died five millennia ago.
