A 10,000-year-old cache of artifacts has emerged from melting ice, and what researchers claim they found inside defies everything known about prehistoric migration. The frozen objects, preserved for millennia, were unearthed high in the mountains where no human settlement was ever believed to exist.
The Otzi discovery began in the late summer of 1991, when a German couple hiking in the Otztal Alps near the Italian-Austrian border noticed a brown shape half buried in a shallow gully. At first it looked like a recent accident victim, and police and rescue teams were called in. They chipped the body out of the ice with axes and a small jackhammer, not realizing the man had died more than 5,000 y…