GENETICS × HEALTH

The Man in the Ice

~5,300 years ago

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian

A man murdered in the Alps around 5,300 years ago, an arrow in his back, was kept whole by the ice, along with his clothes, his tools and his last meals. The copper of his axe was smelted from ore mined in southern Tuscany, a long way from the Alps, whose own ores were already being worked; his genome shows mostly Anatolian-farmer ancestry, probably brown eyes, lactose intolerance, and DNA from the bacterium behind Lyme disease, read as the earliest human infection yet identified.

Why it matters

One preserved person tells what cemeteries of skeletons cannot: tattoos over arthritic joints, the moss that dressed a wound, einkorn and ibex in the stomach, clothing sewn from the hides of five species. Ötzi turned prehistory briefly into biography, and each new technology re-reads him; he remains the measure of how much a single body can archive.

Dating & uncertainty

Radiocarbon places his death around 5,300 years ago; the arrowhead lodged in his shoulder says how it came. His genome, redone at higher coverage, keeps refining the portrait: heavy Anatolian-farmer ancestry, dark skin and eyes, likely balding, lactose intolerant.

Sources

1. Keller et al. (2012), Nature Communications · New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencingdoi:10.1038/ncomms1701
2. Artioli et al. (2017), PLoS ONE · Long-distance connections in the Copper Age: new evidence from the Alpine Iceman’s copper axedoi:10.1371/journal.pone.0179263
3. Zink & Maixner (2019), Gerontology · The current situation of the Tyrolean Icemandoi:10.1159/000501878

Our species’ history as one day

23:35:4624 min 14 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day