It cannot tell us how his actual health expressed those predispositions over the course of a specific life, or how his community managed the conditions that the genetics predicts he was susceptible to.

Most importantly, Ötzi may or may not be representative of his broader population.

He is one individual.

His genome is the genome of one person who lived in one place at one time.

Whether the communities of the Copper Age Alps were all as genetically isolated as his genome suggests, or whether he came from an unusually insular sub-group, cannot be determined from a sample of one.

The 2023 researchers explicitly noted this limitation: “It isn’t clear whether or not Ötzi is representative of people from his time and place,” Krause acknowledged.