The two of us have been fascinated by Otzi since we first heard of him back in the fall of 1991 when he was first discovered in the ice of the Otzal Alps by Erika and Helmut Simon. This week, conflicting research results about Otzi’s DNA has been published.

In 1994 Konrad Spindler, the first archaeologist to study Otzi, authored the definitive book “The Man in the Ice”. We were eager readers and discussed the details with the type of enthusiasm one might have discussed the latest Star Trek episode of the day. And now 14 years later, here we were in Bolzano actually going in to see Otzi. The museum is set up so that you start in the Stone Age and work your way up through Otzi and the Copper Age, then through Bronze, Iron, Roman and Middle Ages. The signage was mostly in Italian and German, but English audioguides (and other languages too) were available for a small extra charge. Entire school groups get in for less than the cost of two adults. A very good deal for nearby teachers and except for the distance from Alberta, the south Tyrol Museum and Archaeology would be perfect place for class field trip.

As I viewed Otzi, I couldn’t help but think of the work of Bryan Sykes how he tracked the peopling of Britain through DNA. I knew that through the work of the Oxford Ancestors much was known about the ancient clans to occupy Britain. And I knew that from a pile of bones called “Cheddar Man”, Sykes was able to extract samples of mitochondrial DNA from the teeth and find through similar haplotyping a modern day descendent in the person of history teacher, Adrian Targett.

What, I wondered, was happening to the DNA studies of Otzi since first considered in 1994. So much more is known now about genomics and the techniques of looking at relationships. Much of this knowledge has come from the work on mtDNA and Y-Chromosome DNA. Here are found segments that mutate at predictable rates and are specifically passed through mothers to offspring or fathers to sons. It was this type of challenge that Sykes used in his work.

Well, imagine my surprise when I read the October 31 headline on Canada.com that there were no immediate relatives of Otzi found in studies carried out by Martin Richards of Leeds University. I found that going to their published work in this month’s issue of Current Biology, the team also made up of Franco Rollo (University of Camerino) and Luca Ermini (Camerino and Leeds) used powerful new technologies to sequence Otzi’s mtDNA and match it with a modern day haplogroup. According to the authors, Otzi belonged to a branch of haplogroup still common throughout Europe but modern Europeans belong to one of three sub-lineages, whereas Otzi’s lineage was completely distinct.

So now I’m thinking that I’ve got a good handle on this and I will await further details. It didn’t take long as on the same day, Alan Cooper at the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA responded by claiming to have found one example of a person who shared 16,568 of 16,569 base-pairs of mtDNA with Otzi. Wow!!

I’ve had a few questions sent in to me regarding the handling of ancient DNA and I will be addressing those questions in a future blog post.