The 5,300-Year-Old Man Found Frozen In The Alps — And The DNA Test That Revealed His Hidden Origins

This steppe ancestry — associated with the Yamnaya and related cultures — is a major component of the ancestry of most modern Europeans.

But here was the problem: Ötzi lived around 3300 BCE, approximately 300 to 500 years before the earliest date at which steppe ancestry appears in the Central European genetic record.

For Ötzi to have steppe ancestry, he would have had to be what genetics researchers call an “outlier” — an individual with ancestry that was anomalous for his time and place.

Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology noted the problem explicitly: Ötzi was “always an outlier” based on the 2012 data.