He was consistent with what the genomic record of his era and region would predict.

But the correction was not the most striking finding.

The Surprising Ancestry: More Anatolian Than Anyone Expected

What the 2023 analysis revealed about Ötzi’s actual ancestry was both clearer and more distinctive than the 2012 results had suggested.

Ötzi’s genome showed an unusually high proportion of ancestry related to early Anatolian farmers — the population that had spread agriculture from the Fertile Crescent of western Asia into Europe beginning around 7,000 to 8,000 years ago.

These Neolithic farmers from Anatolia (the peninsula now occupied by modern Turkey) are the main source of the first European farmers’ ancestry, and their genetic signature is present in virtually all European populations today, mixed to varying degrees with the ancestry of indigenous European hunter-gatherers and the later steppe populations.