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Professor Turi King is in the Italian Alps on the trail of Europe's oldest unsolved murder, Ötzi the Iceman.
So, I'm really looking forward to this story because Ötzi the Iceman is an incredibly famous archaeological story. I teach this at university.
Named after the Ötzal mountain range where he was found. The frozen body of Ötzi was discovered in 1991.
Encased in a block of ice, he's Europe's oldest mummy.
And while many scientists have studied the Iceman, no one has ever truly solved the mystery of his 5000-year-old murder. Turi is heading straight to where the body was found.
We've got a crime scene at 10,000 feet, that's extraordinary. And so, I'm going to go meet an archaeologist called Andreas, and he and I are going to go and see the site.
But this is no ordinary archaeological site. Located on Italy's border with Austria, the crime scene is inaccessible by road and about three and a half hours hike from the nearest village. So Turi is being taken there by helicopter, alongside archaeologist Andreas Putzer.
This landscape has changed little in the last 5000 years. As altitude increases, the meadows and the valleys give way to subalpine forest, and then to snowy peaks.
It is really beautiful.
Yeah.
And the crime scene itself is even more remote.
In 8 minutes, we are in the exact spot.
There, straight ahead.
A ridge ten and a half thousand feet above sea level, that's so rugged it would be difficult for the helicopter to land.
The find site is down there, now straight down, on this rock.
The body was revealed when the ice melted during an unusually warm summer. Today, a memorial marks the spot.
After the discovery, an alpine rescue team went up and they recovered the body.
A body so well-preserved rescuers thought it might be a modern climbing casualty. But later, analysis revealed the glacial conditions had created the oldest, fully intact human mummy ever discovered in water or ice.
The conditions might explain how the victim was so well-preserved, but why he was killed and why here, remains a mystery.
Representation: www.josarsby.com/turi-king
13 сен 2023
