What is the oldest person or event that we know about and why were they important?

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It is the oldest murder mystery in world history.

In 1991, hikers stumbled upon the incredibly preserved body of a man from the Copper Age. The mummy, frozen in the Chnalstal/Val Senales Valley glacier in northern Italy, was dubbed Ötzi the Iceman.

The Iceman holds many secrets for historians, including one intriguing detail: Ötzi met a violent end in the Ötztal Alps.

Ötzi is conceivably the most studied corpse in all of human history. Modern forensic technology has given historians an unparalleled glimpse into one man’s life 5,300 years ago. It is the closest we might ever come to our own time machine.

Appearance

Despite his death around 3300 BCE, scientists know an astonishing amount about Otzi’s appearance.

He was 5 feet 5 inches tall (162.5 cm, about average height for his time), weighed 110 pounds (50 kg), had brown eyes and shoulder-length, dark brown hair, and a size 7½ foot. He was about 45, give or take six years, respectably old for the late Neolithic age — but still in his prime.
Ötzi had the physique of a man who did a lot of strenuous walking but little upper-body work; there was hardly any fat on his body.

He had 61 tattoos, inked with charcoal that punctured the top layer of his skin. The body still had a full assortment of clothing, including a “hide coat, skin leggings, fur hat, and hay-stuffed shoes.”

Murder

Only in 2001 did new body scans reveal the presence of an arrowhead embedded in the Iceman’s left shoulder. Additional study yielded more clues to the violent encounter.

A cut on his right hand, indicating hand-to-hand combat, never had a chance to heal before he died. This means that conflict happened before he was shot, perhaps hours or days before, and may have led to the second conflict that killed him.

After the murder weapon was found, the Italian museum holding the Iceman’s remains contacted Detective Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police. Inspector Horn, working with forensic specialists, set out to discover anything he could about the last days of Ötzi.

They reconstructed his final hours in the mountains.

Inspector Horn reckons Ötzi was in no hurry. At 10,500 feet, he made what appeared to be a camp in a protected gully on the mountain saddle, spreading his belongings around and sitting down to his last meal.
“Roughly half an hour before his death he was having a proper meal, even a heavy meal,” Inspector Horn said. The Copper Age menu was well balanced, consisting of ibex meat, smoked or raw; einkorn wheat (an early domesticated variety), possibly in the form of bread; some sort of fat, which might have been from bacon or cheese; and bracken, a common fern.
There is even evidence that some of his food was recently cooked. “If you’re in a rush and the first thing is to get away from someone trying to kill you, that’s not what you do,” he said. Ötzi’s longbow was only half a day’s work from completion, he added, but there was no sign that he was working on it at the time.

Could Ötzi’s killer, after coming into conflict with him earlier, have stalked him in the mountains? The Iceman was shot by an arrow from approximately 100 feet away. He died with a valuable copper axe, which might rule out robbery as a motive.

Entertaining speculation aside, Ötzi’s continue to fascinate, and new secrets are still to be revealed from further study. It is striking how similar he is to his present-day descendants.

Both in life and in death, the Iceman seems uncannily familiar to his modern descendants, said the museum’s deputy director, Katharina Hersel.
“He is so close to us. He uses the same equipment as we do when he goes to the mountain, just the materials are different,” she said. “And we are still killing each other, so maybe there hasn’t been so much evolution after all.”