The hidden origins were hidden in a specific sense: they had been obscured by contamination in the first genomic analysis, and they were different from what artists and popular media had assumed based on cultural expectations about what an “ancient Alpine man” should look like.

His origins turned out to be primarily Anatolian — the genetic heritage of the Neolithic farmers who had spread agriculture into Europe from the ancient Near East thousands of years before his birth.

He was more purely the descendant of those early farmers than almost any other Copper Age European analyzed, a consequence of the genetic isolation that the Alpine terrain imposed on the communities of the mountain valleys.

He was darker-skinned than anyone had painted or modeled him.