The 5,300-Year-Old Man Found Frozen In The Alps — And The DNA Test That Revealed His Hidden Origins
The first complete ancient mummy genome in history had been contaminated.
This is not a criticism unique to the Ötzi study.
Contamination is one of the perennial challenges of ancient DNA research, and the methods for detecting and excluding it have improved dramatically since 2012.
The researchers who produced the original genome were working at the frontier of what was technically possible at the time, and their work was both genuine and important.
It was also limited by its context, and those limitations produced an error that the later, more sophisticated analysis corrected.
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