A brand new have a look at the Iceman’s DNA reveals that his ancestors weren’t who scientists beforehand thought.

In 2012, scientists compiled a whole image of Ötzi’s genome; it urged that the frozen mummy discovered melting out of a glacier within the Tyrolean Alps had ancestors from the Caspian steppe (SN: 2/28/12). However one thing didn’t add up.

The Iceman is about 5,300 years previous. Different folks with steppe ancestry didn’t seem within the genetic report of central Europe till about 4,900 years in the past. Ötzi “is simply too previous to have that sort of ancestry,” says archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The mother “was at all times an outlier.”

Krause and colleagues put collectively a brand new genetic instruction ebook for the Iceman. The previous genome was closely contaminated with fashionable folks’s DNA, the researchers report August 16 in Cell Genomics. The brand new evaluation reveals that “the steppe ancestry is totally gone.”

However the Iceman nonetheless has oddities. About 90 p.c of Ötzi’s genetic heritage comes from Neolithic farmers, an unusually excessive quantity in contrast with different Copper Age stays, Krause says.

The Iceman’s new genome additionally reveals he had male-pattern baldness and far darker pores and skin than inventive representations recommend. Genes conferring gentle pores and skin tones didn’t turn out to be prevalent till 4,000 to three,000 years in the past when early farmers began consuming plant-based diets and didn’t get as a lot vitamin D from fish and meat as hunter-gathers did, Krause says.

As Ötzi and different historical folks’s DNA illustrate, the pores and skin coloration genetic adjustments took hundreds of years to turn out to be commonplace in Europe.

“Folks that lived in Europe between 40,000 years in the past and eight,000 years in the past have been as darkish as folks in Africa, which makes a variety of sense as a result of [Africa is] the place people got here from,” he says. “We now have at all times imagined that [Europeans] grew to become light-skinned a lot quicker. However now evidently this occurred really fairly late in human historical past.”