As much as we try to say that we look to the future, we have a tendency to look back that we can hardly resist or control. It is very difficult for us to accept that there are things that are unanswered or that we do not know about and that makes us want to solve any mystery that comes our way. When the Copper Age man, who would be renamed Ötzi 5,300 years after his death , was found in the Italian Alps in a state of mummification caused by the cold, he did not imagine the headlines and attention it would attract .
That happened in 1991 , when chance wanted to give a good scare to some German mountaineers by causing them to find a prehistoric corpse among the snow and ice of the Otztal massif . Since then, scientists around the world have felt an irrepressible attraction to know what happened to this man from another time. Not only is it the best-preserved natural mummy ever found , but also unknowns arose about who it was, how it got there and what it could teach us about those distant moments of the human being. Reconstruction of his appearance, analysis of his possible behaviors and customs, in-depth study of the corpse and even exhaustive forensic investigation into the causes of his death; this and more has been done to the bewildered Ötzi.
It is precisely this need to solve the mysteries and know where we come from that has made the Iceman have his own museum and is internationally known and studied. Knowing what he did, how he lived and who he was will not change our current world, but it will allow us to know a little more about us , why we are the way we are. In Ötzi’s cold, empty eyes, once a deep shade of brown, there is still the same curious feeling and soul of any human being.
