The new face of Ötzi

Ötzi is the nickname given to the mummy of a man who lived 5,300 years ago and was found in 1991 at an altitude of 3,210 metres on a glacier in the Val Senales, not far from the Similaun hut. At the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, there is a statue of Ötzi that appears to be alive: the Iceman appears as an elderly, long-limbed, friendly-faced gentleman with long hair, a messy beard, pale skin and brown eyes. The appearance has been reconstructed from genetic analysis, but according to a very recent study, the face of the Iceman was very different. A new DNA analysis indicates that Ötzi had much more melanin in his skin than previously thought and also carried the genetic mutations that cause baldness. In short, he was bald and dark-skinned, very Mediterranean. Why was he so dark? Because 8,000 years ago, farmers from Anatolia (more or less present-day Turkey) began migrating to Europe where they mixed with local hunter-gatherer populations. A large part of Ötzi's genome comes from Asia Minor.