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Thank you. Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Hallie, and this is the Morbid Curiosity podcast.

Music On most occasions, when archaeologists find human remains, they must try to reconstruct

the past from very meager evidence.

The longer the remains have been in the ground, the less likely any evidence about that person and their life

remains to be found. This is the case with most on earth remains from the late Stone Age,

or Neolithic period, which occurred in Europe between 5,500 BCE and 2000 BCE. Most information

we have about early humans from this period comes from burials,

and not much is left but a few bones and possibly a few grave goods.

These remains tell us about how the dead were treated, but not much about how they lived.

However, one discovery changed everything we know about humans in the Neolithic,

and it came in the form of a corpse, frozen in time.

On September 19, 1991, Helmut and Erica Simon were hiking in the Uztdale Alps on the border between Austria and Italy.

It was warmer than usual, thanks to a hot wind blowing dust up from the Sahara, and the glaciers

on the mountains were melting. As they hiked along the ridge, they passed a shallow, rocky hollow,

and noticed something brown amongst the melting snow.

As they got closer, they saw that it was a human head and shoulders, lying face down in a puddle.

...