The Man in the Ice by Konrad Spindler Weidenfeld & Nicolson $250 IT was a dignified death. Injured, maybe after an attack by marauders, maybe during an internal village dispute, the man had fled to the high ground on what are now the Otztal Alps on the Austrian-Italian border.
There, as a blizzard or fog closed in and exhaustion took over, in a gully in the rock, perhaps familiar from previous crossings of what was a well-known pass between the mountains, he settled down for the night.
He left his axe, bow and back-pack on the ledge of a rock. He may have eaten a last meal of tough, dried ibex meat. He dropped his quiver and, with pain piercing his right side from a broken rib, he lay down for a short rest.
His clothes froze as the temperature dropped and he drifted to sleep. Death followed soon afterwards. By the morning his frozen corpse was covered with snow; within hours he had been engulfed by the outer reaches of the glacier.
All this happened 5,300 years ago and the fact that the last hours of this Neolithic hunter and herdsman can be described in such extraordinary detail is due to the highly undignified way in which the Iceman came back into the human world in 1991, as a mummified corpse spotted by two climbers out for an afternoon's quiet mountaineering.
This time there was to be no solitude. His largely preserved body - the skin and a few of his clothes were intact, many of his possessions were found nearby - was poked at, manhandled and abused to free it from the grip of the ice before the importance of this astonishing find was realised.
Here was not what was first surmised; the body of a climber given up by the glacier after a few score years, or maybe even a traveller lost for a couple of centuries. This was a Stone Age European who had come back from the dead to share his secrets withthe modern world.