In 1991 an amazing discovery was made and a 5,300 year old murder mystery was revealed. High in the Alps near the Italian-Austrian border, a human body dating from the Chalcolithic age was discovered. Öetzi the Iceman, as he came to be known, is Europe's oldest natural human mummy. In the intervening 19 years, anthropologists and other interested scientists have learned much about him. He had arthritis in his knees and underwent acupuncture to relieve the pain, his last meal was deer meat with roots, grains, and fruit, and that he most likely died of an arrow wound and possibly a blow to the face with a mace.
Further work on Öetzi's genetic material has revealed another fact about him: he has no living descendants. New data that is set to appear in this week's on line edition of Current Biology goes against previous conclusions, reached in the mid-nineties, that suggested Öetzi has some living descendants. Both research projects examined mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed down through the maternal lineage. It changes relatively rapidly over time and allows for researchers to trace genetic lineages.
Since DNA starts to break down immediately after death, the more time that has elapsed, the more difficult it is to sequence. The researchers who first looked at Öetzi in the mid-nineties only examined a small part of his mtDNA, which has fragmented severely in the interceding 5000-plus years. This new work examined over 250 segments of what is left of his genetic material. The team, led by Professor Franco Rollo and Dr. Luca Ermini, found that Öetzi belonged to a genetic lineage known as K1—a genetic line still common in Europe today.
It is known from other work that modern Europeans in the K1 line belong to one of three sublineages, but Öetzi's lineage is not among them....
