A new analysis of ancient DNA from 15 people who lived in the Italian Alps around the same time as Ötzi the Iceman shows that Ötzi's ancestry was decidedly different from his neighbors'.
"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."
