In September 1991, two German hikers traversing the Ötztal Valley region of the Austrian Alps came across what they thought was a mountaineer who had die*d recently.
Instead, the human remains belonged to the victim of a 5,300-year-old murd_er. And when officials brought in a police detective to solve the mystery of the victim’s demise, he said that the body was “in better condition than recent homicide victims I’ve worked on who have been found out in the open.”
Indeed, the freezing ice in the Austrian glacier had kept the subject in a near-perfect state of preservation — and 31 years later, researchers are still able to learn new things from him.