The age of the iceman in the film was forty thousand years. Seven years after this film was released, a real "iceman" was discovered in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Named 'Ötzi the Iceman', the real-life iceman had pollen found in his stomach just like the iceman in this film.
This movie was part of a 1980s cycle of prehistoric man movies. The films included: Altered States (1980), Caveman (1981), Quest for Fire (1981), Cavegirl (1985), Luggage of the Gods! (1983), Hundra (1983), Iceman (1984), Ghost Warrior (1984), The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986) and Missing Link (1988).
The name for the type of environmentally-controlled enclosure, in which the iceman lived, is a "Vivarium". They are usually used for doing research on animals or plants.
Fred Schepisi has said of this film: "Iceman is a way of looking at us. There is wonder in looking at someone who is really us from the beginning. I thought this film could have been, as novelist Vladimir Nabokov observed, 'The precision of poetry, and the intuition of science.'"
The film opens and ends with a title card quotation from an Inuit Legend that reads: "I, who was born to die shall live. That the world of animals, and the world of men may come together, I shall live."