A new look at Ötzi the Iceman’s DNA reveals new ancestry and other surprises
Ötzi was balding, dark-skinned and didn’t have ancestors from the Caspian steppe
A new look at the Iceman’s DNA reveals that his ancestors weren’t who scientists previously thought. Discovered in 1991, scientists compiled a complete picture of Ötzi’s genome in 2012.
It suggested that the frozen mummy found melting out of a glacier in the Tyrolean Alps had ancestors from the Caspian steppe (SN: 2/28/12). But something didn’t add up.
The Iceman is about 5,300 years old. Other people with steppe ancestry didn’t appear in the genetic record of central Europe until about 4,900 years ago.
Ötzi “is too old to have that type of ancestry,” says archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The mummy “was always an outlier.”
Krause and colleagues put together a new genetic instruction book for the Iceman. The old genome was heavily contaminated with modern people’s DNA, the researchers report August 16 in Cell Genomics.
The new analysis reveals that “the steppe ancestry is completely gone.” But the Iceman still has oddities.
About 90 percent of Ötzi’s genetic heritage comes from Neolithic farmers, an unusually high amount compared with other Copper Age remains, Krause says.
The Iceman’s new genome also reveals he had male-pattern baldness and much darker skin than artistic representations suggest. Genes conferring light skin tones didn’t become prevalent until 4,000 to 3,000 years ago when early farmers started eating plant-based diets and didn’t get as much vitamin D from fish and meat as hunter-gathers did, Krause says.
As Ötzi and other ancient people’s DNA illustrate, the skin color genetic changes took thousands of years to become commonplace in Europe.
“People that lived in Europe between 40,000 years ago and 8,000 years ago were as dark as people in Africa, which makes a lot of sense because [Africa is] where humans came from,” he says. “We have always imagined that [Europeans] became light-skinned much faster. But now it seems that this happened actually quite late in human history.”
See more here sciencenews.org
Header image: Science News
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Wisenox
| #
“The Iceman is about 5,300 years old. Other people with steppe ancestry didn’t appear in the genetic record of central Europe until about 4,900 years ago.”
I think there’s room for disagreement. 5,300 years would place him after the Samara culture on the eurasian steppe. They were centered around Kyev and are the origin of horse symbolism and 1/2 of the covenant.
The other half came from the Samarra culture, 2 r’s, in the south. They started the side of chaos and were located at the site of Babylon.
Samara and Samarra both mean “land of the nobility”, and together, their first “enterprise” was Sumeria, which could be translated as “land created by the nobility”
These cultures drove the transition to neolithic farming, and their symbolism is full of it. The iceman could have easily descended from these cultures, who ended up taking over the steppe anyway.
These early steppe cultures could have easily made their way west towards Austria. Europe’s waterways would have been seen as ideal for trade.
Also, major trade was already occurring, and had been for a very long time. Gobekli Tepe is an example of a trading mound from years earlier. Researchers have noted that the Gobekli Tepe culture is distinct from steppe culture. I don’t know much about the cultures between Gobekli and Samara on the steppe, but that may be where Iceman is descended from.
I’m not sure that his DNA is “too old” for the region. I think it fits in line with westward expansion and trade.
Reply