Original subtitles

He's the oldest human specimen we have

that is so complete

So well preserved

He continues to generate this body of information

He may well be

the most studied human being in history

The Iceman

He was found in a glacier,

frozen in time for 5,000 years

An ancient murder mystery

Ready to go?

What can we learn from him?

What is his story?

We figured he was probably Italian

Wrong

Eastern European?

North African?

Wrong, wrong, wrong

Where's this guy from?

Scientists search for answers hidden in his genetic code

We're rewriting the history of humankind

As an artist brings him back to life

When they believe that it's real, then I have done my job

Science and art join to share the Iceman and his secrets

with the world

We have to turn this thing from plastic to flesh

"Iceman Reborn," right now, on NOVA.

In a custom-built lab, a team of doctors suits up

Strict precautions are taken

Okay

Because this is a very unusual case

The patient has been dead for over 5,000 years

This is Ötzi, the Iceman

one of the oldest and best preserved intact human bodies

ever found

The story of Ötzi's discovery is still one of the most astounding

in human history

1991... on a 10,000-foot glacier

near the border of Austria and Italy,

two hikers come across the body of a man face down in the ice

They have no idea the importance of what they've stumbled upon

Perhaps it's a mountaineer,

or even a lost soldier from World War I

But as they pull the remains from the ice,

capturing the recovery on video,

certain clues point to a different story...

A knife made of stone;

a shoe made of grass;

a quiver of arrows;

leather leggings;

a copper ax

Carbon dating later reveals that the body

and the items found with it

have been preserved in the mountain ice

for over 5,000 years

Ötzi becomes not only an international sensation

but also a scientific treasure

He's the oldest human specimen we have that is so complete,

so well preserved

With all the scientific disciplines

that are intrigued by him, that want answers,

he may well be the most studied human being in history

Now, new technology is yielding more clues,

revealing surprising secrets

about this mysterious ancient man

and the world he lived in,

from the strange markings that cover his body

to the DNA in his bones

Researchers are trying to use his genetic code to uncover

his true origins,

to track down his relatives, alive, even today,

and help solve long-standing mysteries

about how people lived at the end of the Stone Age

Ötzi provides a window into what life looked like 5,000 years ago

in Europe

So it's kind of like finding the Ark of the Covenant

How important is that?

Yeah, it's pretty important

The clues begin with Ötzi himself

At the time of his death, he was about 45 years old, 5'2" tall,

weighing about 110 pounds

New research deciphering Ötzi's genetic code

reveals he had brown eyes, dark hair, and had both Lyme disease

and a predisposition to heart disease

But that's not what killed him on the mountain

At first, it was thought that the Iceman had frozen to death

in a storm and been buried in the snow

But a radiologist reviewing his x-rays spotted something strange

that had escaped everyone else's notice:

an arrowhead lodged deep in the Iceman's shoulder

The arrowhead was detected in 2001

And then the question was did the arrowhead kill him or not?

CT or CAT scans of the body

revealing Ötzi's internal anatomy in amazing detail

provided more clues

We could reconstruct then the area where the arrow entered

the body and disrupted a major artery of the left arm

If you're losing so much blood,

after ten to 15 minutes you are dead

From this, we knew that he was killed by this arrow shot

Shot and left to die on the mountain

The mystery was deepening

Who was Ötzi?

What did he do for a living?

Who were his people?

And why was he killed?

The answers will not be easy to find

because Ötzi's condition is so delicate

Ötzi has spent years locked in a freezer

at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

His cell, kept at a chilly 19 degrees, is designed

to protect him from potentially destructive microbes

No one enters the sterile environment

except Ötzi's doctors

The Iceman is kept

under sterile condition in this refrigeration cell

And that's why we have to take care who's entering the cell,

because we want to avoid that anybody brings in

any kind of contamination

Yeah, ready to go

Today an exception has been made for an artist named Gary Staab

Gary has been charged with a difficult mission...

To sculpt an exact replica of the Iceman,

a copy that will be accessible to researchers and to the public

who can't get close to the real thing

We cannot allow everybody entering the cell

who has maybe a certain research question to inspect the mummy

We want to make a good copy people can use to see,

to get very close, to get data which cannot be done

with the original mummy, it's always really a risk

Nail bed, pinky, nine millimeters

Gary has limited time to take in all the details

of this rare and unique human body

I am soaking in every single detail I can lay my eyes on

He must create the most accurate replica possible:

Ötzi's twin

Right index, five millimeters

He evaluates Ötzi's skin tone and texture

The keratin has fallen off the nailbeds

His distorted face

That cartilage is so, so thin

His ravaged hip

Yes, you have a very big defect

of soft tissues and bone tissues

Because of the damage, this will be very difficult to replicate

In the process of getting every detail just right,

Gary will have to learn all he can

about the Iceman and his times...

How he lived, died, and became mummified

What is his story?

What can we learn from him,

and how can he enrich our understanding of the past?

Okay?

Very good

Dr Eduard Egarter-Vigl calls an end to Gary's visit

Any more thawing and the Iceman could be in danger

of bacterial contamination

Absolutely amazing

That was the fastest 30 minutes of my life

This very intimate moment with the mummy

will be very helpful in the final product

It will be so much better because of that

With Ötzi safe in his sterile crypt,

Gary will begin to bring his body double to life

To start, the CT scans that helped determine

Ötzi's cause of death will provide a detailed blueprint

for the Iceman's twin

thanks to a remarkable technology

3D printing

Ötzi will literally be printed out in three dimensions

We use our software

to transform the CT images into a 3D model that you can print

Special software converts the data

into a stack of over 2,000 horizontal slices,

creating a blueprint of Ötzi's body

This is then fed into a computer,

which controls a gigantic five-foot by 18-foot machine

known as "the Mammoth"

They have the ability to create the entire print in one piece,

which is very rare

In this enormous vat,

350 gallons of liquid resin the consistency of warm honey

will be transformed into a life-size plastic model

of the Iceman

The computer guides lasers around a thin layer

of liquid resin

We use a laser to trace out cross sections of Ötzi

and under UV lights the polymer starts to harden

Once it solidifies, just a few seconds,

a very thin layer is positioned on top of it

and the laser hardens it out again

and this way the model is built layer by layer

For nearly three days, the lasers continue their work,

little by little, until every small bump and hollow

on the surface of the Iceman's body

is present and accounted for

This is very exciting

We're using the newest technologies

to three-dimensionally print the oldest wet mummy ever found

Finally, it's time to reveal the 3D print

Oh my gosh, this is fantastic

Transformed from liquid to solid

The face details are beautiful

That is absolutely fantastic

Ötzi's body has been reconstructed

as one extremely detailed hollow piece of plastic

Beautifully translucent but it still captures

all the forms and the shapes

As the model emerges, the Iceman is reborn

Ötzi coming out of this resin was kind of overwhelming

Because slowly his face was revealed,

his feet were revealed, his ribcage

And it was super exciting to know

that that three-dimensional print

was at such a high resolution,

I really have something to work with

It is on this plastic Ötzi that Gary will sculpt

the life-like version

It's a treat to see it in one color

because there's nothing distracting your eye

I'm also looking at anatomical features that correspond

to the structures that I saw in the freezer

While Gary reviews Ötzi's plastic form,

scientists continue to hunt down clues

about the flesh-and-blood man

For Albert Zink, who oversees research on the mummy,

Ötzi's CT scans are especially valuable

because a look at Ötzi's muscles and joints can tell us a lot

about his life and lifestyle,

perhaps even how he made a living

The two main ways of life 5,300 years ago were farming

and hunting and gathering

You can reconstruct the muscles, the muscle structure,

how the muscles are attached at the bones

We just could extract all this from the CT scans

Zink notices Ötzi did not show signs of strain

in his upper body muscles and joints

That might rule out farming

In his upper part, in his shoulders,

in the arms and hands, there is almost nothing,

and for a man which was about 40 to 50 years old

in this time period, we would expect some changes

if he had worked with his hands

The scans do indicate severe damage in the muscles and joints

of his legs and back,

which suggests he was a constant traveler

Also, the mummy's knee and hip joints are missing

a lot of their cartilage...

A painful condition called arthrosis,

a kind of arthritis caused by wear and tear

The physical facts of the Iceman

were that he had lower back problems

The same is true for the knee

We know he had some arthrosis of the knee joints,

and this caused pain from time to time

Ötzi died in the mountains

and he likely spent much of his life there, too

We know from his physical appearance

that he was walking a lot, that he maybe was carrying

some heavy things

So maybe he was trading something

It could be that he was really traveling a lot

But we cannot really say what was his role in society

Searching for even more evidence about this enigmatic man,

scientists perform a kind of autopsy on Ötzi

They remove specimens from inside

his most culturally sensitive organ

This is stomach here

His stomach

And they are able to extract Ötzi's last meal,

eaten only hours before his death

Some of the contents point to Ötzi being a hunter

So much material from the stomach now

He had wild ibex meat in his stomach,

so he was clearly hunting for part of his sustenance

He also had einkorn wheat

Einkorn wheat has to come from farming

It's this classical kind of interesting mystery

Ötzi's sending us mixed messages about how he's living his life

In addition to food, researchers also found

different kinds of pollen in the Iceman's stomach

This revealed that Ötzi had been traveling

up and down the mountain within the last 48 hours of his life

Ötzi seems to have been a man on the move

whose adventures came to a violent end

More than 5,000 years later,

Ötzi's twin is on a journey of its own

across the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Kearney, Missouri,

in the American heartland

Here, Gary Staab brings ancient fossils back to life

He is a master model maker,

and over the years he has been commissioned to build replicas

of dozens of extinct creatures for museums around the world

He has fashioned prehistoric fish,

sculpted life-size dinosaurs, and crafted giant crocodiles

I've spent entirely way too much time

on the inside of large animals

From the miniature to the monstrous,

whether it swims, crawls, or flies,

Gary's job is to resurrect the long dead

So the fascinating fact is

that 99% of all life that has ever existed

on earth is extinct

So, I follow floods

I follow volcanic eruptions, mass death events

I'm a bit of an ambulance chaser,

but I'm just a little bit late

Maybe a few thousand years late

In some cases, 50 or 60 million years late

Gary's investigations... all to better understand his subjects

and the worlds they lived in...

Have taken him around the globe,

from exotic excavation sites to ancient fossil fields

Most of the time my job is to sculpt animals for museums

And we only have their bones

We only have fossils

So I have to take something that no one is exactly sure

what it looked like, and try and breathe life into it

This is a neat situation;

we know exactly what Iceman looks like

So my job is to replicate him exactly as he looks right now

What's in here?

Now Gary faces one of the biggest challenges

of his career:

creating the exact replica of Ötzi the Iceman

It's like Neolithic Christmas

The plastic model generated by the 3D printer

has just arrived in his studio

It was an amazing feeling to finally lift him

out of the crate and take him onto the table

By the time we're finished, we will work thousand of hours

3D printing technology has provided the artist

with a good head start...

A model with physical dimensions exact to the millimeter

It's a perfect match to the shape of the Iceman,

but the surface of the model is not detailed enough

to create a believable replica

We've got a lot of work ahead of us

Gary and his team will need to sculpt Ötzi

the old-fashioned way... All by hand

There is not one centimeter

of this thing that isn't complicated

It's going to be very hard

It will be a four-part process

Sculpting, molding, painting,

and crafting minute surface details

will take Gary and his team months to complete

The challenges are many

We have not only the elements of the skin texture,

we have the detail of the face

We have the detail of the hands

And we have to figure out how to replicate the hips

The hip is going to be very challenging to do

You guys start on this end and work your way up

and I'll start on the head and then I'll meet you

somewhere in the middle, I hope

The first step: darken the mummy's body

to better reveal the exact contours of the 3D print

We can't actually read the surface when it's translucent

So we take a very dark and penetrating stain

and we paint it over the top of the three-dimensional print

It allows us to see the surface in a much better way

So we can read those shapes, and then actually make judgments

on how we're going to sculpt the surface based on what we see

There are thousands of considerations...

Not hundreds, thousands of considerations,

that have to be taken into account for

while you are doing this

Next, Gary replicates Ötzi's skin

with especially malleable modeling clay

As the thin clay bonds to the resin,

Gary and his team sculpt every detail

of the mummy's surface texture, inch by inch

Getting Ötzi's skin just right

is one of the main challenges for Gary and his crew

We have to turn this thing from plastic to flesh

Human skin is actually an organ... the largest we have

On average, it takes about 20 square feet of skin

to cover a human body

It will take hundreds of hours

to replicate Ötzi's complex mummified surface

Pick out some of these that might work well

and then run some samples

Gary relies on texture pads

to press patterns into Ötzi's clay skin

I have hundreds of textures in a box

I pulled them out to see which ones might match

These flexible rubber patches create

varied imprints on the wet clay

Human skin has three layers

The epidermis, or outer layer,

acts as a waterproof wrapping and a guard against infection

It also determines our skin color

The next layer, the dermis,

is made up of tough connective tissue,

along with nerve endings,

hair follicles, and sweat glands

Finally, the deep hypodermis

consists of subcutaneous fat and more connective tissue

Gary and his team are sculpting

the second layer of Ötzi's skin... the dermis

Most of the outer layer was lost to the mountain

If you look at the skin of this mummy,

you have to realize that

this body has been lying in ice for years

The ice isn't always stable,

so in summer, the ice melts into water

If it's in water for too long,

the upper layer of the skin, the epidermis, separates

and you lose it

The layers underneath,

the dermis and the subcutaneous layer, remain preserved

A lot of hair, fingernails, and toenails have been lost

Enough of the Iceman's skin,

along with soft tissue and muscle,

has been preserved to make Ötzi a true mummy

For Gary, Ötzi is not the first mummy he has replicated,

but certainly one of the most unique

Mummies can be created naturally or artificially

Artificial mummies, like those from ancient Egypt,

were made by intentionally blocking the decaying process

The important thing during mummification

is that it happens immediately

So the natural process is the degradation

or the decomposition of a body,

so it has to be stopped immediately

This was the case for one of the most famous mummies of all:

the Egyptian pharaoh King Tutankhamun

He was embalmed and then coated in a black resin-like liquid

that encased and preserved his skin

But in natural mummies like Ötzi,

or those discovered on mountaintops in the Andes,

or bog bodies found buried in peat,

the environment alone preserves the body

The Iceman is a natural mummy

He was naturally captured in the ice

And he's also a humid mummy,

so he still contains some water in his tissue

that makes him also so difficult to preserve

It is luck that Ötzi was preserved at all

He was nearly lost forever

Fortunately, his body lay in a small trench,

protected by large rocks on two sides

This trench eventually filled in with ten feet of snow and ice,

preventing the Iceman from being swept

into the deadly frozen current that flowed around it

This makes him also quite unique

He's one of a few ice mummies that exist at all,

and he's the only natural ice mummy we have

in the Alpine region

The ice preserved Ötzi,

but the great weight of the glacier

eventually flattened his body,

creating the ultra-lean frame that Gary is now duplicating

After weeks of work,

the replica is covered in a layer of white clay

that matches the texture of Ötzi's body

But in order for Gary to finish the face,

he must remove Ötzi's head

It's much easier to sculpt away from the body

So you have to bring it to where you can focus,

get exactly in a zone where physically,

you can work on it for that length of time

and not get ultra-fatigued

Ötzi's face presents a particular challenge

This will be the thing that everyone looks at

They'll engage it in the face, in the eyes,

and that's where they will spend most of their time

This is where he will become a person to them

He has a really wild-looking face

It's a bit grotesque in some ways

His lip is actually pushed up here

because he was lying face down on a rock,

and that pressure on his face and over his nose

The nose is so difficult to tease out the details

of what's actually happening there...

You know, what am I actually seeing,

what's doing what... So that it can be correct

It's entirely possible

I will know his face better than his mother did

After months of sculpting, molding,

and crafting the exact details of the Iceman,

Gary has reached the most visible stage in his process

I'm at a very exciting point

The paint

Finally, I can actually put color on

Painting is a very fun part of this process,

and it's very fun to see this come to life through color

From the rims of his eyes to the tips of his toes,

Gary must match every inch of Ötzi's skin to the original

including the mummy's mysterious markings

Many sets of parallel lines

and two crosses

These are Ötzi's tattoos

The Iceman is the oldest tattooed mummy ever discovered

It's complicated because there's so many

Yes, he's covered with a lot of tattoos

Researcher Marco Samadelli has been one of Ötzi's caretakers

for nearly 20 years

How did you catalogue each one of these?

Recently, Marco set out

to inventory every tattoo on Ötzi's skin

We discovered exactly 61 tattoos

That's a lot of ink

It's difficult to see the tattoos

on a 5,000-year-old mummy

Marco's research revealed something

no one had ever seen before,

thanks to a unique camera sensitive to invisible light

Multispectral imaging is a technique used

to see what the eye can't see

It's with this we discovered every single detail,

even under the surface of the mummy's skin

The exact number and location of all the tattoos

was a mystery until now

We discovered a tattoo that had never been seen before:

four parallel lines on the right side of his chest

We were able to locate all his tattoos

and obtain a complete mapping

61 tattoos

arranged in 19 groups across his body

Archaeologist Aaron Deter-Wolf

studies the use of tattoos in ancient cultures

Tattooing has been practiced

throughout a huge portion of human history

going back at least 16,000 or 18,000 years before present

During that time period,

people have been tattooed for all sorts of different reasons

depending on their culture and the region in which they lived

Aaron has come to Gary's studio to demonstrate how and why

he believes Ötzi's tattoos may have been made

We're going to take a piece of pigskin,

which is a proxy for human skin,

and we're going to use these reproduction tools

to tattoo that skin in the same patterns

that are on Ötzi's body

Aaron thinks Ötzi's tattoos were most likely created

with a technique that was widespread in the ancient world:

by using a sharp needle, probably made from bone,

to puncture the skin and push ink,

made from charcoal, into the tiny shallow wounds

What you want to do is just dip the tip of the tool,

and then you're just going to go in very, very shallowly

Microscopic and chemical analysis reveals that

the dark lines are made primarily of carbon,

along with bits of silica

A composition

most likely collected around the edge of a campfire

So what kind of depth?

Less than a millimeter

You can feel the skin give

Just a little tiny pop

That's moving through that epidermis, yep

I thought it would be a little bit easier,

but it takes hundreds and hundreds of punctures

to actually get a solid line

I am using the exact same stabbing technique

with a brush on the model

Looking at how difficult it was

to create those tattoos on pigskin,

imagine the pain that Ötzi had to go through

when he had his tattoos made

I wouldn't get a tattoo that way

So why would Ötzi endure

this painful process

not just once, but dozens of times?

We generally agree that Ötzi's tattoos

don't seem on the whole to be decorative or symbolic

For Aaron and other experts,

a key clue to understanding the purpose of the tattoos

could be where they've been placed

A number of Ötzi's tattoos seemed to correspond

to areas where he suffered from ailments or injuries

He had arthritis in his lower back,

and there are tattoos on his lower lumbar area

He had arthritis in his right knee;

there are tattoos on the back of his right knee

He had arthritis in his ankles; there are a number of tattoos

around both his right and left ankles

Most recently, this new set of tattoos

is located on his lower right abdomen

Among the many ailments that he suffered from

was gallstones and whipworms in his colon,

and this is a place that is very close to those areas

and could potentially have been used

to treat the pains he was experiencing

Tattooing the skin to alleviate pain

has been the practice of many cultures

There are therapeutic tattoo traditions

that have been documented all across the world:

in India,

in Southeast Asia,

in North America, in the American Arctic

Ötzi's tattoos are the earliest direct evidence

of this ancient tradition

But the tattoos may not have been

the only medicinal treatment Ötzi relied on

In the woods of Upstate New York,

archaeologist Patrick Hunt is tracking down wild mushrooms

With the help of David Work, an expert in fungi,

they're hunting for two varieties...

The same ones that Ötzi carried with him 5,300 years ago

This is very much like the forests

that Ötzi would have known in the Tyrol,

where you've got mixed deciduous forests

Wow, that's a beautiful example

I can probably roll this over

Maybe not

If you're carrying two different mushrooms,

you must have a pretty good idea

they address different functions

One mushroom, known as tinder fungus,

is often used to start fires

When dried, it ignites easily and burns for a long time

The other kind of fungus, which Ötzi carried on leather straps,

is called birch polypore

I'm gonna harvest this one

Most believe Ötzi was carrying

this particular mushroom for another reason

This white section here

Its antiseptic power

Take this mushroom,

peel off the spore layers,

and you can put that directly on a wound

It's antibacterial, it's antiviral

Here, I have a cut there

We'll put that there

And you can actually tie it around

with a piece of grass

Band-Aid

You don't need bacterial agents

because it's got it in the mushroom

It's already there

Pretty cool

In addition to the topical treatment,

Ötzi may have ingested the mushroom

as a kind of Stone Age pain killer

The peculiar thing is, it has the exact properties

that act as remedies

to what Ötzi had wrong with him

It's been used in modern periods

for some of these same functions,

but Ötzi is the oldest case on the record

for anybody knowing this

We thought that this was a relatively modern discovery

Obviously, it's been around for a long time

As Ötzi continues to challenge scientists and historians

to revise their picture of the past,

Gary Staab is facing his own challenge

in the reconstruction of the mummy's body

Gary knew it would be a problem

ever since his day in the freezer:

the Iceman's damaged hip,

perhaps mauled by an animal scavenger after Ötzi's death

It's clear that the animals

go to this part of the body

Scavenging

Because it's a big attraction for the animals

The hip is very, very complicated

In fact, it's almost as complicated

as making the entire mummy on its own

While Gary's studio team makes hundreds of simulated tendons

from natural fibers that are frayed and dipped in paraffin,

Gary builds Ötzi's ravaged backside

Because included in the complexity of this,

there's dried muscle overlaid by tendons,

then you have frayed tendons up against bone,

the bone itself,

the cancellous bone or the bone marrow

inside of the bone that's fractured and torn apart,

and then you have the soft tissues

that overlay the bone on this side,

you've got lower bowel intestine that's exposed and broken

with bowel stomach contents inside of it,

and then you have fat deposition in here

So just this section alone has that many different finishes

that have to be replicated, so this is by far

the most complicated project I've ever worked on

It will take weeks to sculpt the Iceman's injured hip

Meanwhile, scientists continue to search

for Ötzi's true identity,

investigating perhaps the most revealing evidence available:

Iceman's genetic code

Genetics is giving us insights

that we cannot get through any other means

The genetic blueprint of every living thing is written in DNA

It's made of four chemicals,

abbreviated as A, C, G, and T

These four letters, in a twisting double helix,

are arranged into 23 pairs of chromosomes within each cell

This is our biological code

containing all the information to build and run our bodies

Ötzi was one of the first ancient Europeans

to have his entire code, or genome, analyzed

It provided detailed clues to his appearance and health

If you look at a particular gene on chromosome 15,

it's the gene that most likely determines eye color

If you see a pair of Gs at this position,

that likely means that the person has blue eyes

Whereas in the case of Ötzi,

we see an A from both parents,

and so that likely means that

he had dark-colored eyes

On another chromosome, number 12,

two Ts indicate that his hair was also dark

Other chromosomes reveal new details

Ötzi had blood type O

He even had a predisposition for arteriosclerosis...

Heart disease,

often assumed to be associated with our modern lifestyle

The team also found DNA fragments

from the microbe that causes Lyme disease,

making Ötzi the earliest known case

But what about his origins?

Who were Ötzi's ancestors?

The very cool thing about DNA

is that changes in DNA literally make us who we are

The material that we inherit from our mom and our dad

links us to all of our ancestors,

and by comparing DNA across individuals in populations,

we can get a very rich picture of our ancestry:

who are we related to, where did they come from?

Finding answers is especially important

because Ötzi dates to around the time

when prehistoric Europe was undergoing major changes,

as the ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle

was gradually displaced by farming

Ötzi comes

from an incredibly important period in European history,

where we go from hunter- gatherers living in Europe

to the widespread adoption of farming

Because it's a transitional time period in which Ötzi lives,

there are huge life ways that converge,

whether people are hunter-gatherers

or whether they're early farmers

He's in transition

His culture's in transition

45,000 years ago, modern humans first began arriving in Europe

They were hunter-gatherers,

foraging plants and hunting wild game

Then, about 7,000 years ago, everything began to change

People in Europe began to cultivate crops for food

And by about 5,000 years ago, the hunter-gatherer culture

had almost completely disappeared from the continent

It is one of the most revolutionary transformations

in human history

Where does Ötzi fit into this changing landscape?

Did he come from a group of ancient hunter-gatherers

who still lived in pockets throughout Europe?

Or were his people farmers

living a more settled life in the foothills of the Alps?

Scientists turn to Ötzi's pre-historic artifacts

for more insight

When you excavate

or find someone who died 5,000 years ago,

usually, all you have left are the bones

What is so fantastic about Ötzi is that

because he was found in a glacier,

because he was frozen in time for 5,000-plus years,

everything survives: his clothes, his tools

Among the items recovered from the glacier were a fur hat,

patchwork leggings made of leather,

deerskin shoes stuffed with hay,

a six-foot longbow,

a quiver that held over a dozen arrows

If you want an arrow shaft,

you want the woods that he chose, cornel and viburnum

They grow very straight,

they're easily harvested, they're fairly prolific

His expertly made weapons

seem well suited for a man who hunted for his meals

But other objects paint a different picture

Ötzi's finely crafted copper ax,

one of the oldest metal tools ever found in Europe,

points to a more advanced society...

One based on farming

Could the Iceman's DNA help solve the mystery

and determine whether Ötzi's people

were hunter-gatherers or farmers?

To find out, researchers focus on mutations in the DNA,

random mistakes that can occur

when the billions of chemicals that make up our genetic code...

All those As, Ts, Gs, and Cs... Get copied

The human genome is three billion base pairs long

Every once in a while, you get a mutation,

and that mutation sometimes ends up spreading

These mutations help create specific patterns

of genetic variation in our DNA inherited from our parents

The closer two people are related,

the more of these patterns they'll have in common

So whose DNA does Ötzi match best:

the hunter-gatherers or the farmers?

The only way to get at that was to have other ancient samples

from known farmers and known hunter-gatherers

from across Europe across different points in time

They found the sample DNA

in the bones of dozens of ancient people

excavated from archaeological sites all over Europe

Some samples go back 45,000 years,

when hunting was the only way of life

Other samples were from 7,000-year-old farming sites

And the result?

Ötzi's DNA is a close match to that of ancient farmers,

not hunter-gatherers

It became pretty clear

that all of the individuals

that we had labeled archaeologically as farmers

were closest to Ötzi

Ötzi's DNA reveals that he was descended from farmers

who were in Europe nearly 2,000 years before he was born

What's more,

the same DNA patterns show up in even older bones found

in some of the earliest known farming sites in the world,

in what is today Turkey

This suggests that farmers migrated to Europe from Turkey,

filling much of the continent

Eventually, they pushed aside most of the hunter-gatherers

and their DNA

So where is Ötzi's DNA now?

Could he have distant relatives alive even today?

Comparing his genome

to modern DNA samples from all over Europe

would provide the answer

Who Ötzi really was genetically surprised us

When we started analyzing Ötzi,

we figured, "Ah, he was probably Italian"

Wrong... didn't cluster with the Italians

Maybe he's Austrian?

Wrong... he didn't cluster with the Austrians

Eastern European?

Wrong

North African?

Wrong, wrong, wrong

So where's this guy from?

And it turned out,

much to our surprise, that his closest living relatives

were on the island of Sardinia

Totally unexpected

Does this mean that Ötzi was Sardinian?

Not necessarily

Most likely, 5,300 years ago, when the Iceman was born,

most people in Europe, including Sardinians,

carried similar patterns in their DNA

from the early farmer immigrants

But over the last 5,000 years,

Europe has seen wave after wave of new immigrants,

adding new patterns of DNA to the mix

Except on the isolated island of Sardinia

There, ever since the early farmers arrived,

the inhabitants and their DNA pattern

have stayed relatively stable

This wave of farmers that swept through Europe

made it to Sardinia and stayed there

as a genetic snapshot

of what that wave of immigration looked like

This makes today's Sardinians Ötzi's closest living relatives

Over the past five months,

here at Gary's studio in Missouri,

the Iceman has undergone a complicated transformation

If they look at this and they believe that it's real,

then I've done my job,

and we want only Ötzi to be the final product

It's just about Ötzi

Before the model is finished,

its accuracy will be put to the ultimate test

So good to see you

When Albert Zink, who oversees the institute

for mummies and the Iceman in Italy,

comes to examine Gary's work

I'm absolutely petrified that he's here to see this

because he is the person

who is the most familiar with the mummy

My goal is to have him for one second be fooled

that maybe he's actually looking at Ötzi

I have to tell you something, it's really good

It's a really good work

I'm really very impressed

It's really amazing

That's good

Wow, wow

Some moments, I felt that

the mummy's outside of his freezer, it's too dangerous

But then I realized it's the replica

You managed to give him this kind of expression

that you still can feel somewhat that this was a human being,

somebody who lived very long ago

It's really a masterpiece

This is great for scholars because with this replica,

you can really explore in much more detail

In combination with all the other data we have,

I think this will bring us also a step forward in our research

With Albert Zink's approval, the time has come for Gary

to share the replica with the world

All right

He's brought Ötzi to New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,

one of the world's foremost genetic research institutes

For Gary, it's like dropping a child off

at the first day of school

I'm a little bit nervous

It's been a really long road,

and it's a lot of work culminating with this day

For many years, the director of Cold Spring Harbor

was James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA's double helix

It's remarkable

It was very exciting to get DNA

from 5,000 years ago

Ötzi could never have known that how he lived and died

would intrigue and inspire future generations

It looks like he's looking at you

Like these students,

some of whom have been studying him for years

Ötzi is a great example

of how DNA can help us learn about the past

He's awesome, coolest dead guy in the world

What's incredible about the Ötzi story is

that as technology's gotten better and better,

it's the gift that keeps on giving

We can keep going back to the sample,

and it yields new mysteries and new insights

into both human history and into Ötzi himself

Ötzi was a man on the move

until an arrow ended his journey through life

But his death on the mountain would ultimately take him

much farther than he could ever have imagined,

and make him one of the most famous and fascinating humans

who ever walked the earth