And he is also irretrievably absent, separated from us not just by five thousand years but by the silence that is all the prehistoric past can finally offer.

That combination — unprecedented access and irreducible absence — is what makes him one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of human knowledge.

The DNA changed important parts of his story: it corrected the contamination that had introduced false steppe ancestry into the 2012 genome, it revealed darker skin than anyone had depicted in thirty years of reconstructions, it identified the genetic signature of male-pattern baldness, and it placed him precisely in the genetically isolated Alpine communities of the Copper Age.

These were real changes to real understanding.