History editor Christoph Gunkel is good on foot and also moves quickly on skis. This tour still pushed him to the limit of his strength: trailed by a 70-year-old but extremely wiry mountain guide, he trudged in strong winds and minus 17 degrees to the place in South Tyrol where hikers found "Ötzi" in 1991. It is a hollow on the glacier at an altitude of 3210 meters, an inconspicuous place. But Christoph wanted to see it before he returned, frozen, to the archeology museum in Bolzano.

The leathery corpse has been on display there since 1998. It had

been plucked out of the ice

rather brutally

; initially no one knew of its scientific value. Only extreme mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who happened to be on a mountain tour with a colleague, had his first inkling that it could be thousands of years old.

Since then, the mummy, known to Brits as

“Frozen Fritz

,” has become world famous. Researchers have learned all sorts of things from her: what Ötzi last ate (ibex meat), his blood type (o positive), what plagued him (from osteoarthritis to lactose intolerance) and how he died - namely by an arrow from behind.

Christoph opened the entire

“Ötzi file”

: staged as a crime thriller in the museum, a murder on the glacier. Ötzi has long been the most studied dead person ever and still poses a mystery to researchers. It was not until 2023 that a team came to surprising findings: According to this, the Iceman was dark-skinned, had roots in the Middle East and a predisposition to baldness - an early human with a migration background, an Alpine Anatolian, preserved on the Tisenjoch for five millennia.

Detective work with high technology

The story of Ötzi is part of the SPIEGEL-HISTORY issue, which is published today:

People of the Stone Age - our amazing ancestors.

It also shows how science today measures early human history. There are no records or documents from the Stone Age, this almost unimaginable period of 2.6 million years. The lives of our ancestors can only be reconstructed from the traces they left behind.

The foundations of our current way of life were laid in the Stone Age. Very different early humans moved from Africa into the world, their existence repeatedly threatened by dramatic climatic events. Little by little they developed language, art and medicine. Eventually they discovered agriculture and village life. Today we can draw conclusions about their culture from how they designed the first decorative objects, cared for the sick or buried the victims of wars.

It is a

clan called Homo

with generic names such as

habilis

,

ergaster

,

erectus

,

heidelbergensis

,

neanderthalensis

up to

Homo sapiens

. Our magazine editor Frank Patalong, who has been involved in paleontology for decades, knows them all by first and last name. They have one thing in common: their name is human. And our picture of how they lived is becoming more and more detailed.

Interdisciplinary research brought enormous progress, particularly through detective work in the laboratory. Story editor Jonas Breng visited the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, where two

stars of science

conduct research: Svante Pääbo, 68, is something like the godfather of Stone Age research and received the Nobel Prize in 2022, like his father 40 years earlier. He is the mentor of Johannes Krause, who achieved a coup as a doctoral student when he discovered the Denisovan as a previously unknown human form using DNA sequencing.

Since then, Krause, 43, has established archaeogenetics as a field of research. He reads genomes like a book and can explain this scientific work, a back-breaking job, like no one else. "It's terra incognita, a great adventure," says Krause. »Our tool works

like a time machine

. This allows us to travel into the biological past of several species and basically ask anything that interests us.«

Studying the Stone Age has many fascinating and amusing aspects, for example when you look at the enigmatic handprints on prehistoric rocks: Raise your hands, cave walls. Or accompany the experimental archaeologist Harm Paulsen as he recreates ancient weapons and shoots pork carcasses with a bow and arrow. Or delve deeply into pop culture, which portrayed the Neanderthal in films

sometimes as a joke figure, sometimes as an archaic hero

.

Above all, however, this era throws us back to timeless questions: How did we become what we are? And when does a human being become a human being? You can find answers to this in the freshly printed issue of SPIEGEL geschichte, which you can now get digitally here wherever there are good magazines. Please write to us and tell us what you think of the magazine or what other topics you would like to read more about. You can always reach us by email at spiegelgeschichte@spiegel.de.

The editorial team at SPIEGEL geschichte recommends:

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