Law and Order: The Ancient World:

Murder at 10,000 Feet

Imagine you are a hiker, and you are making your way through the Italian Alps, when you see something sticking out of the ice.

Coming closer, you realize it's a body, and you call the authorities.

Which would lead to an investigation, which proved that the victim had not died by accident - he had been murdered. And the murder had happened about 5,000 years ago.

Using what the investigation found, let us reconstruct his story . . .

We don’t know his actual name. He has been nicknamed “Otzi” because of the location where his body was found. He was an older man for his time, and had joint pain, which he treated with tattoos on the hurting parts, still visible when his body was found. And we know his society was undergoing a technological revolution.

It was changing from being a group of hunter-gatherers to using agriculture. And “Otzi” was right at the front of this change.

No other item showed this more than his axe, because it had a copper head, which meant it was bleeding edge tech at the time.

Besides his axe, he clearly knew how to prepare for a trip up a mountain, including bringing basically a sandwich with him to eat later.

But he probably did this in a hurry.

Because he had been injured, probably in a fight. His right hand had been struck with a sharp blade, deep enough that if he had to use the bow he carried, it would be with great difficulty.

As it happened, he never got to even try.

He went up a mountain, and must have felt like he was safe, as he ate the small snack he had taken with him.

And before he could even stand back up, he was shot in the back with an arrow.

He fell into the snow, and died within a minute or so.

His attacker didn’t try to loot the body, as Otzi still would have his valuable axe with him when he was found, thousands of years later.

There are many ironies in his death. He went from a powerful member of his community to a body lost in the snow, but when he was found, he became a scientific miracle - an almost perfectly preserved artifact of a crucial time in the history of humans.

No human body in history has been examined more, but some mysteries remain, and probably always will, like who was his killer, or why exactly he was killed.

And yet, people travel to look at his face, his clothes, his equipment - and wonder about this man, a time traveller of a sort. They wonder about the times he lived in, and the fight that ended his life.

And wonder is one human quality that he probably shared, and it is one quality that will probably exist as long as humans exist.

End.