Copper, which came from specific ore deposits in the Alps and in the eastern Mediterranean, was a prestige commodity that moved through extensive exchange networks.

The flint that Ötzi used for his tools and arrows came from a source in the Trentino region that has been geochemically identified — suggesting either that Ötzi traveled widely enough to collect his own flint, or that he obtained it through trade networks that connected the different communities of the Alpine region.

The communities of the Copper Age Alps were connected to a much wider world.

The genetics of Copper Age European populations — established through the analysis of multiple ancient genomes — reflects a mixture of ancestry from the Neolithic farmers who had arrived in Europe from Anatolia thousands of years earlier, the indigenous European hunter-gatherers who had preceded them, and (in many regions) populations from the Eurasian steppe who were beginning to move westward across Europe.