*It just occurred to me that this guy wasn't "murdered;" instead, he was a member of a raiding party. They were coming down from the mountains to steal, they got into a dust-up where his hand got hurt. Then his pals grabbed some booty, and they ran off uphill again, hotly pursued. Otzi had lost some blood, and his best weapons, maybe he was limping a little. So he lagged, and he got shot in the back. His pals couldn't defend him, they had to leave him in the snow. The pursuers didn't see Otzi either; they were too busy chasing off the rest of the bandits.
*So Otzi just got lost. For quite some long time. But he was not some mysterious guy roaming alone in the Appenines, for reasons entirely his own; he was a war casualty. There was a whole band of Otzis; he was just an older one, rather past his prime.
*The guy had amazing kit; it's the opposite of "crude," it's made of organic and found materials, but very well-considered and skillfully arranged. But the stuff discovered on his body is not the stuff he started out with. He was trying to make a new bow because he lost his old one, and his arrows, too. He was likely a pretty bold figure when he first rushed downhill, but then he became a straggler after a military reverse, and that's what we're seeing here.
Stone Tools Forensics Revealed The Last Days of Ötzi The Iceman via @forbes The last days of Otzi
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Pollen grains of plants growing in mountains and valleys of the Alps and preserved in his last meals suggest that 48 hours before his death he descended from 7,000 ft into the valley at 3,000 ft. Here a struggle ensued, as the man was stabbed into his right hand. He apparently fled from the aggressors, as in just 6 to 7 hours he climbed towards the mountain pass, taking with him only the most essential equipment, like a dagger, an end scraper, a borer and a flake all made of chert, a quartz-rich, hard rock mined in the Alps already 9,000 years ago. His wooden bow was unfinished and just two arrows complete with arrowheads. A team of archaeologists and geologists has studied Ötzi's tools in great detail, discovering evidence suggesting that Ötzi was a fugitive long before his murder.
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http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198292
