The people who inhabited the Alpine valleys five thousand years ago are not entirely gone.

Their genetic heritage, diluted and mixed across many generations, is part of the ancestry of the people who live in that region today.

The living men who share Ötzi’s Y-chromosome haplogroup carry, in that one genetic thread, a connection to the Copper Age populations that built what eventually became European civilization.

The connection is thin, attenuated across fifty centuries of birth and death and mixing and change.

But it is real.