The DNA changed the story.

And the story, changed, is one of the most remarkable in the history of archaeology: a man from five thousand years ago, preserved in ice on the border of modern Italy and Austria, studied by scientists from dozens of countries using methods that could not have been imagined when he was alive, revealing through his own DNA the shape of the world he came from and the way he looked in the morning light of the Copper Age Alps.

The hidden origins are hidden no longer.

And Ötzi — dark-skinned, bald, middle-aged, murdered — remains in his refrigerator in Bolzano, waiting for the next question science will find to ask of him.