In a cold store in northern Italy, Ötzi the Iceman lies behind controlled glass and steel, kept at a steady chill that mimics the glacier that once sealed him away. He has been there since 1991, when hikers stumbled upon what appeared to be a recent body lodged in the melting ice of the Ötztal Alps. The assumption didn’t last long. What followed was the slow recognition of a man who had died more than five millennia earlier, preserved with an odd completeness that still feels slightly out of place in modern laboratory rooms. Skin, tattoos, fragments of clothing, and even traces of his last meals have all been mapped and re-examined. Now attention has shifted again, this time towards something less visible: the microscopic life still associated with him, and whether any of it is doing more than simply lingering.
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