He was exactly what his time and place predicted: a representative of the genetically isolated Alpine communities of the Copper Age, communities that had maintained a high proportion of the Anatolian farmer ancestry brought to Europe by the Neolithic farming expansion thousands of years before his birth, communities that had been shielded from the gene flow that mixed other populations into each other by the barrier of the mountains they lived in.

His dark skin was not hidden in the sense of being unknown — genetics can in principle reveal it, and the 2012 analysis had already suggested a darker phenotype than the popular image, though not as dark as the 2023 analysis indicates.

But the degree of darkness, the gap between the popular reconstructions and the actual genetic evidence, was larger than most people appreciated.

His baldness was hidden in a different sense: it was simply not known before the 2023 analysis identified the relevant genetic markers.