In the Copper Age, this predisposition would not have manifested as obesity (the food environment did not provide the caloric excess that produces obesity in modern populations), but it reflects the same genetic variants that, in a modern environment with food abundance, would increase cardiovascular risk.

The Lyme disease bacteria found in his gut suggests that he was in an environment with tick exposure — consistent with the alpine terrain he inhabited.

His immune genetics, analyzed through variants in immune system genes, showed patterns consistent with the genetic background of the Neolithic farmer ancestry that dominates his genome.

The genetic analysis of health is one of the more speculative but also one of the more medically interesting dimensions of ancient genome research.

Ancient genomes serve as a kind of retrospective clinical record — a way of asking whether the genetic variants associated with modern diseases existed in historical populations, and whether the presence of those variants corresponded to the actual diseases they predict today.