New DNA Study Examines Ötzi the Iceman's Neighbors

TYROL, AUSTRIA—When the well-preserved body of the famous Ötzi the Iceman was recovered from the ice in the Austrian-Italian Alps in 1991, his remains provided archaeologists with a wealth of information about life in Europe more than 5,000 years ago. Surprisingly, sequencing of his genome indicated that he shared a very high proportion of his ancestry with early farmers who lived in Anatolia. Science News Today reports that a groundbreaking new study analyzed the DNA of 47 other individuals who lived alongside Ötzi in the Austrian Tyrol between 6400 and 1300 b.c. to determine if they shared genomic similarities. The research indicated that, like Ötzi, 80 to 90 percent of these individuals' ancestry came from Neolithic farmers who had migrated to Europe during the Neolithic period. The results also showed that after that time, there was a remarkable genetic stability over two millennia, and that communities in the Alps were not affected genetically by waves of immigrants and newcomers like in the rest of Europe. Like the Iceman, they also had dark hair, dark eyes, and were lactose intolerant. However, Ötzi’s genetic background has now proved to be unique, as his paternal lineage did not match that of any of the other 47 individuals. Moreover, his maternal lineage does not match that of any known population in Europe, modern or ancient. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Communications. To read more about study of Ötzi, go to "What Ailed the Iceman?"