The World's Oldest Unsolved Murder (Who Killed Ötzi?)

A man was shot in the back with an arrow five thousand three hundred years ago. His case file is still open, and the evidence is frozen in perfect condition. In this episode we open the oldest murder case in history: two tourists find a body in the ice of the Alps in 1991, everyone assumes it is a recently dead climber, and the truth only comes out when an archaeologist takes one look at his axe. What follows is ten years of the official theory being "a shepherd caught in a storm", until a radiologist spots a small white triangle under the left shoulder on X-rays that had existed from day one: an arrowhead. From there the case reopens with today's full arsenal: the defensive wound on his hand, the last meal eaten half an hour before he died, the pollen that rebuilds his final two days step by step, the verdict of a real criminal profiler from the Munich police, and the most unsettling theory in the whole file: somebody pulled out the arrow shaft so they would not be recognised. The first evidence cover-up in history. At the end we also take apart the "curse of Ötzi", with statistics instead of fear. Tell me in the comments: who do you think killed Ötzi, and why did they leave his axe behind, the most precious object for kilometres around? SOURCES: South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Bolzano, the Ötzi collection and conservation Current Biology (2018), the stomach content study, the last meal (Maixner, Zink, Eurac Research) Max Planck Institute and Eurac Research (2023), the complete genome sequencing History.com, "Cracking the World's Oldest Cold Case", the profile by Alexander Horn Encyclopaedia Britannica, the discovery and dating Stay curious. #Evrika #Otzi #history