We might think of science as a profoundly modern feature of human life, extending our understanding of the world around us far beyond what we can see and touch. But the essence of science - observation, experimentation, adaptation - has been around since the dawn of humanity. 

In September 1991, a pair of German hikers in the Ötztal Alps, near the border between Austria and Italy, spotted something brown and human-shaped sticking out of a glacier. They immediately reported this to the authorities, thinking they had discovered the body of someone who had died while hiking. While they were correct about it being a dead body, they were a little off on the timing: what they found turned out to be the mummified corpse of a man who had died sometime before 3100 BCE.