The 5,300-Year-Old Man Found Frozen In The Alps — And The DNA Test That Revealed His Hidden Origins
He was also entirely himself.
He was not a representative ancient human in the sense of being average or typical.
His specific ancestry — unusually high Anatolian farmer genetic heritage — was at the extreme end of the distribution for his time and place.
His specific situation at death — armed but not attacked from the front, resting after a good meal, with defensive wounds suggesting a recent struggle — was specific to him and his specific circumstances.
The conversation between these two dimensions of his identity — the typical and the individual, the representative and the specific — is what makes Ötzi so valuable as a scientific and human document.
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