Ancient DNA Reveals Otzi The Iceman's Surprising Secrets, Scientists Are Stunned!

Ancient DNA Reveals Otzi The Iceman's Surprising Secrets, Scientists Are Stunned! For more than thirty years, the world looked at reconstructions of Otzi the Iceman and saw a pale-skinned, light-eyed, heavily-bearded man staring back. He had become one of the most recognizable faces in prehistoric archaeology, the first human being from 5,300 years ago whose features we believed we knew.In August 2023, a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano published a high-coverage reanalysis of Otzi's genome in the journal Cell Genomics. The new sequencing technology they used was significantly more powerful than what was available when the genome was first decoded in 2012. The dataset of prehistoric European individuals it could compare against had grown from a handful to more than ten thousand individuals studied across the continent. The findings corrected virtually every assumption about his appearance. He had dark skin, significantly darker than any of the previous reconstructions had suggested. He had brown eyes, which some versions had gotten right. And he was going bald, with genetic markers for male pattern baldness that the mummy itself, dark and hairless, had been displaying for thirty years while the reconstructions kept giving him a full head of hair.