Improved DNA analysis has updated thinking on the skin color, ancestry, and more of the alpine mummy known as Ötzi the Iceman
In 1991, hikers in an Italian valley near the border with Austria stumbled on a frozen corpse. The remains belonged to a man who had died around 5,300 years earlier, after being shot by an arrow. Nicknamed Ötzi, after the valley where he was found, the iceman became a sensation — capturing the imagination of people around the world and giving scientists unprecedented insight into ancient Europeans.
The discovery makes sense, considering the mummy’s dark colouration and lack of hair, says co-author Albert Zink, a mummy researcher at Eurac Research in Bolzano, Italy. Brown eyes, pale skin? Ötzi’s preservation on ice presented an early opportunity to do ancient-DNA work. In 2012, researchers published a draft version of Ötzi’s genome — one of the first ancient genomes ever sequenced. The analysis suggested that Ötzi had pale skin, brown eyes and steppe ancestry.
Ancient-DNA technology has since improved by leaps and bounds. So, Zink and his colleagues collected shards from Ötzi’s exposed hip bone and sent it to Germany to be sequenced.
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