Ötzi had genetic variants for male-pattern baldness and dark skin, and he also had an unusual amount of early farmer ancestry, a new DNA analysis finds.
A new look at the Iceman’s DNA reveals that his ancestors weren’t who scientists previously thought.; it suggested that the frozen mummy found melting out of a glacier in the Tyrolean Alps had ancestors from the Caspian steppe . 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.”with modern people’s DNA, the researchers report August 16 inBut the Iceman still has oddities.
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.”
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