It confirmed his close genetic relationship to modern Sardinians, who are known to carry a higher proportion of ancient Neolithic farmer ancestry than most other modern European populations.

It identified his Y-chromosome haplogroup as G2a4, a lineage associated with Neolithic Anatolian farmers.

It provided information about his blood type (O) and about several genetic predispositions.

But one of the 2012 findings turned out to be wrong — and its wrongness is a lesson in both the importance of methodological rigor in ancient DNA research and the way in which scientific findings are sometimes contaminated by the technical limitations of the methods used.

The 2012 genome identified what appeared to be genetic ancestry from the Pontic steppe — the grassland regions north of the Black Sea from which a massive migration of pastoralists is known to have spread into Europe beginning around 2800 to 3000 years BCE, bringing with them a genetic package that dramatically transformed European populations.