In 1991, two German hikers crossing the Ötztal Alps stumbled on a body melting out of the ice, at first assumed to be a lost mountaineer. It turned out to be over 5,300 years old: a Copper Age man now known as Ötzi, preserved down to his skin, tattoos, and stomach contents. The film follows the scientists who have spent decades reconstructing his life from the evidence he carried, a copper axe, a bow and quiver, finely stitched leather clothing, and a flint arrowhead lodged in his shoulder that eventually revealed how he died. Researchers in labs and at the discovery site walk through what his DNA, his last meals, and his equipment say about diet, trade, and violence in Alpine Europe thousands of years before written history. Forensic reconstructions and interviews with the archaeologists and pathologists who examined him build a picture of a specific person, his health problems, his last days, and the ambush that killed him, rather than a generic sketch of prehistoric life.