![]() “The Iceman genome was the second or third (depending whether you count Neanderthals) ancient human genome ever published,” says Iain Mathieson, a population geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania, who wasn’t involved in the new study. Ötzi’s genes show little mixing with the hunter-gatherer populations already living in Europe during that time, suggesting that his community was small and relatively isolated in their beautiful but remote alpine environment. The study also used comparisons with other ancient individuals’ DNA to suggest that the Iceman is descended, in large part, from the Anatolian agriculturalists who first brought farming to Europe about 9,000 years ago, through what is now Turkey into Greece and the Balkan Peninsula. And contrary to most artists’ interpretations, it also appears that he suffered from an age-old affliction still troublesome today-he was going bald. ![]() The study published Wednesday in Cell Genomics reveals that Ötzi had dark eyes and skin pigmentation darker than that commonly seen among modern inhabitants of Greece or Sicily, though he’s previously been depicted with lighter skin more akin to that of Europeans living in the Alps today. ![]() ![]() Scientists have newly sequenced Ötzi’s genome a decade after an earlier effort, using modern techniques and comparative data to produce a much higher-quality result than ever before. Now, a detailed genetic study has revealed much more about what the Iceman looked like-and traces the Copper Age corpse’s ancestral lineage back to Anatolia, an area that is now the Asian portion of Turkey. ![]() But while the wizened mummy is extraordinarily well preserved for its age, it gives little impression of how Ötzi would have appeared in life. Years of studies have revealed much about the Iceman, from his last meal-dried ibex and deer meat with einkorn wheat-to the distant Tuscan origins of his copper ax. Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old mummy found murdered high in the Alps with an arrow in his back, is a prehistoric celebrity who attracts 300,000 visitors a year to his custom cooling chamber in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. ![]()
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