Otzi - The Iceman

In September 1991, two German hikers on a remote pass in the Tyrolean Alps stumbled on a body of a man lying half-buried in the snow, with one hand shielding his head and eyes as if to protect himself from a snowstorm. The corpse was first thought to be that of one of the many climbers who have perished in the mountains over the last 200 years, later it was discovered by fascinated scientists to be the mummified remains of a Bronze Age man more than 5000 years old. The dead man was about 5ft  2in (1.57m) tall and weighed 121lb (55kg). He wore leather shoes and a leather tunic and leggings which had been padded with dry grass for insulation against the cold. The stone bead strung on a leather thong around the neck may have been worn as jewellery or was perhaps a badge of rank. He also carried hunting tools. Scientists who examined his remains at the University of Innsbruck in Austria gave him the nickname Otzi, after the Otztaler Alps where he met his death. The body is now in a museum at Bolzano, Italy.