Image: Reconstruction by Kennis © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Foto Ochsenreiter
SAN FRANCISCO — Ötzi the Iceman, an astonishingly well-preserved Neolithic mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991, was a native of Central Europe, not a first-generation émigré from Sardinia, new research shows. And genetically, he looked a lot like other Stone Age farmers throughout Europe.
The new findings, reported Thursday (Nov. 8) here at the American Society of Human Genetics conference, support the theory that farmers, and not just the technology of farming, spread during prehistoric times from the Middle East all the way to Finland.
"The idea is that the spread of farming and agriculture, right now we have good evidence that it was also associated with a movement of people and not only technology," said study co-author Martin Sikora, a geneticist at Stanford University.
In what may be the world's oldest cold case, Ötzi was pierced by an arrow and bled to death on a glacier in the Alps between Austria and Italy more than 5,000 years ago. [Album: A New Face for Otzi the Iceman]
Scientists sequenced Ötzi's genome earlier this year, yielding a surprising result: The Iceman was more closely related to present-day Sardinians than he was to present-day Central Europeans.
But the researchers sequenced only part of the genome, and the results didn't resolve an underlying question: Did most of the Neolithic people in Central Europe have genetic profiles more characteristic of Sardinia, or had Ötzi's family recently emigrated from Southern Europe?
"Maybe Ötzi was just a tourist, maybe his parents were Sardinian and he decided to move to the Alps," Sikora said.
That would have required Ötzi's family to travel hundreds of miles, an unlikely prospect, Sikora said.
"Five thousand years ago, it's not really expected that our populations were so mobile," Sikora told LiveScience.
To answer that question, Sikora's team sequenced Ötzi's entire genome and compared it with those from hundreds of modern-day Europeans, as well as the genomes of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer found in Sweden, a farmer from Sweden, a 7,000-year-old hunter-gatherer iceman found in Iberia, and an Iron Age man found in Bulgaria.
The team confirmed that, of modern people, Sardinians are Ötzi's closest relatives. But among the prehistoric quartet, Ötzi most closely resembled the farmers found in Bulgaria and Sweden, while the Swedish and Iberian hunter-gatherers looked more like present-day Northern Europeans.
The findings support the notion that people migrating from the Middle East all the way to Northern Europe brought agriculture with them and mixed with the native hunter-gatherers, enabling the population to explode, Sikora said.
While the traces of these ancient migrations are largely lost in most of Europe, Sardinian islanders remained more isolated and therefore retain larger genetic traces of those first Neolithic farmers, Sikora said.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that farming played a major role in shaping the people of Europe, said Chris Gignoux, a geneticist at the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.
"I think it's really intriguing," Gignoux said. "The more that people are sequencing these ancient genomes from Europe, that we're really starting to see the impact of farmers moving into Europe."
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8 Comments
Add CommentCould Ötzi's Axe be used as a plough?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"While the traces of these ancient migrations are largely lost in most of Europe, Sardinian islanders remained more isolated and therefore retain larger genetic traces of those first Neolithic farmers, Sikora said."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWere the "larger genetic traces" a product of their isolation or a later infusion of Middle eastern blood during the Muslim raids of the Middle Ages?
In evaluating the "theory that farmers, and not just the technology of farming, spread during prehistoric times from the Middle East all the way to Finland", it'd be very interesting to understand how many people would have had to move the entire distance over what period of time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs for the objections to Otzi being a "tourist":
"That would have required Ötzi's family to travel hundreds of miles, an unlikely prospect"
"Five thousand years ago, it's not really expected that our populations were so mobile..."
Couldn't Otzi's family taken weeks or even years to travel those hundreds of miles?
I'm interested in learning who killed Ötzi and why. Based on current information it would appear that Ötzi most likely committed an offense against another individual or individuals and was brought to quick justice. Perhaps Ötzi wasn't a farmer, tourist or someone who merely chose to relocate to an unknown location. Perhaps Ötzi was an ancient criminal. More than ancestry can be determined by genetics and I believe the answers to my questions are within our grasp.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy it’s Chris Kristofferson! Well, we already knew he was a well-preserved Neolithic caveman.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNot likely. I've seen in other stories that Otzi's killer removed the shaft of arrow that killed him (presumably beacuse the fletchings, etc. would have been identifiable), but left a very rare and valuable copper axe that Otzi had been carrying. This suggests that Otzi was known and respected in the area. If Otzi was a criminal, his killer would have wanted to take proof to show everyone that he was dead; instead, s/he made a clear effort to make sure no one could connect him/her to the killing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe authors continue to fail to appreciate the mobility of early humans. Several hundred miles would be quite easy in the scheme of things. What should cause us to take pause is not the distances but the reasons they may have had to undertake such a journey. The most basic motivation for the migration of early humans is that they were either pushed by others or the ones doing the pushing. If the Sardinian origin holds true it may be this island was overpopulated for the technology of the time. The resulting frictions pushed some to the mainland where contact with other groups could have fostered more conflict. This basic point also helps explain the violent nature of Otzi's demise.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProbably the Sardinia islanders and Otzi, the Iceman had a common origin, coming from the middle east. He didn't appear to be your typical farmer, carrying bow and arrows, and a copper axe which probably would have been equivalent to a fortune at the time, although the bow shaft and most of the arrows were unfinished, so perhaps he was a fletcher or bow and arrow craftsman.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProbably regions were populated over generations rather than a single move, perhaps hunters seeing inviting areas or regions which appeared to have a lot of game, and such regions usually would be good places to farm as well, with underlying fertility of the soil and favorable climate.
I don't have any problem with the Iceman being related to the Sardinia islanders.