© Getty ImagesÖtzi the Iceman, shown here in a reconstruction, had a unique family lineage, ancient DNA of him and his Copper Age neighbors reveals.
"We analysed an additional 15 Copper Age individuals and they have the same genetic structure as the Iceman," Valentina Coia, a researcher at the Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy, told Live Science in an email. But when looking more closely at the DNA to understand lineages, "we were able to compare the results with those of the Iceman and found that it differs from the other Alpine samples in the area."
In a study published July 11 in the journal Nature Communications, Coia and colleagues analyzed the genomes of 47 people who lived in the Tyrolean Alps between the Mesolithic and the Middle Bronze Age, around 6400 to 1300 B.C., to learn more about their ancestry.
The most famous individual they examined was Ötzi, who lived 5,300 years ago in the Alps before he was murdered in mysterious circumstances. His mummified and frozen corpse was discovered by tourists in 1991. Because a previous study found that Ötzi had "unusually high Anatolian farmer ancestry," the researchers wanted to investigate whether the Iceman's neighbors — who lived in the Alps in the Copper Age, between 3368 and 3108 B.C. — had a similar ancestry or whether they were more closely related to hunter-gatherer groups from the Eurasian Steppe.
