Oetzi the Iceman traces his roots to present day Türkiye

Oetzi the Iceman has a new look. Decades after the famous glacier mummy was discovered in the Italian Alps, scientists have dug back into his DNA to paint a better picture of the ancient hunter.

They determined that Oetzi was mostly descended from farmers from present day Türkiye, and his head was balder and skin darker than what was initially thought, according to a study published on Aug. 16 in the journal Cell Genomics.

Oetzi's remains were found in September 1991 in South Tyrol, the northern Italian region where he was also believed to have roamed. Mummified in ice, he was discovered by two German hikers in the Oetztal Alps, 3,210 meters above sea level, more than 5,000 years after his death.

Since then, scientists have used hi-tech, non-invasive diagnostics and genomic sequencing to penetrate his mysterious past.

Initial analysis of his genome had earlier suggested that he had genetic traces of steppe herders from eastern Europe.

But Max Planck's scientists said the latest results no longer support this finding. Rather, they believed the original sample to have been contaminated with modern DNA that led to the erroneous finding.

Advances in technology have also allowed for a more specific look into Oetzi's past.

"Among the hundreds of early European people who lived at the same time as Oetzi and whose genomes are now available, Oetzi's genome has more ancestry in common with early Anatolian farmers than any of his European counterparts," said the institute's team.

Johannes Krause, head of the Department of Archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who co-authored the study, said his team was "very surprised to find no traces of eastern European steppe herders in the most...