5,300-Year-Old Iceman: Alpine Discovery Reveals Prehistoric Violence

More than five millennia before anyone thought to write history down, a man died violently in the high passes of the Alps, his body swallowed by ice and returned to us in 1991 as if time itself had relented. Ötzi the Iceman — lean, tattooed, armed with an unfinished bow — carries in his frozen flesh a quiet refutation of the myth that prehistoric life was simple or peaceful. His arrowhead wound, his sixty-one therapeutic tattoos, and the grain still resting in his stomach remind us that the full complexity of human experience — craft, conflict, suffering, and care — reaches back further than o