Monday, April 9, 2012

Are You Related to Otzi the Iceman?

This 5,300-year-old Iceman has close relatives living in the Mediterranean: Great article discussing the recreation of Otzi's life and, specifically, the advances being made in DNA-based genealogy, as well as the isolating genetics effects that islands have.  Here's the really interesting part for genealogists:

But the coolest results from this study are the ones linking the Iceman to his modern day descendants. Surprisingly, when Zink and his colleagues compared Ötzi's genome with that of modern day European populations, they found he was most closely related not to people from Northern Italy (where he was discovered), but "present-day inhabitants of the Tyrrhenian Sea," specifically men from the islands of Sardinia and Corsica.

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