As the Max Planck Institute informed on Wednesday, “Ötzi” is said to have had Anatolian ancestors, dark skin and an advanced bald head. In addition, the “Iceman” had a predisposition to diabetes and obesity.
Although the genome was already decoded in 2012, advances in sequencing technology have been made since then. A research team from the Max Planck Institute and Eurac Research has now achieved a much more precise reconstruction of the genome. It was shown that in comparison to other Europeans in “Ötzi” the genetic proportion of early farmers who had immigrated from Anatolia was unusually high. From this it can be concluded that he came from a “relatively isolated Alpine population with little contact with other European groups,” it said.
Anatolian ancestors
First, researchers had found genetic traces of a steppe population. But now it turned out that the sample from that time had been contaminated with modern DNA. In addition, since then many genomes of prehistoric Europeans, often from skeletal finds, have been completely decoded, making comparisons possible. “Of the hundreds of early European humans who lived at the same time as ‘Ötzi’ and whose genomes are available, ‘Ötzi’ has the most farming ancestry,” the research team said.
“We were very surprised to find no traces of the Eastern European steppe shepherds in the new ‘Ötzi’ genome, and the proportion of hunter-gatherer genes in ‘Ötzi’ is also very low. Genetically, he looks as if his ancestors came directly from Anatolia come,” reported Johannes Krause, head of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and co-author of the study, which was published in “Cell Genomics”.
Dark skin color
In addition to the ancestors, the scientists were also interested in the appearance of the approximately 5,300-year-old glacier mummy. His skin type, already determined as Mediterranean-European in the first genome analysis, was even darker than previously assumed. “It’s the darkest skin tone detected in European finds from the same period,” said anthropologist and study co-author Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummy Research at Eurac Research in Bolzano. “Up until now, it was thought that the mummy’s skin had darkened during storage in the ice, but what we are seeing now is probably largely ‘Ötzi’s’ original skin color. Of course, knowing this is also important for conservation,” he noted .
Thinning fringe of hair
It is also very likely that he no longer had long, thick hair, but at most a sparse wreath. His genes showed a predisposition to balding: “This is a relatively clear result and could also explain why almost no hair was found in the mummy,” said Zink. An increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes was also part of ‘Ötzi’s’ hereditary traits, but thanks to his healthy lifestyle it probably didn’t come into play.
Reconstruction remains as it is
However, the South Tyrolean Archeology Museum, where the glacier mummy is on display, noted that it was not possible to determine how far Ötzi’s balding had progressed. “After all, nine centimeter long, dark locks of hair were found near the mummy,” it said. That is why museum director Elisabeth Vallazza is careful with the interpretation of the results. The reconstruction of Ötzi in the museum is an “attempt at interpretation, a suggestion of how we would imagine the Iceman to be during his lifetime. The figure was created in 2011 by the paleo artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis, based on the state of research at the time. It was all about that to show that Ötzi was a modern person: middle-aged, tattooed, wiry, weather-beaten, a person like you and me. There are currently no plans to revise the reconstruction,” Vallazza stated.
Source: Nachrichten
