The mummy’s sparse hair had been attributed to the effects of time and preservation processes.

The genetics suggests a contribution from biology as well.

Together, these findings add up to a revised portrait: a middle-aged Copper Age man with darker skin than popular imagination had given him, probably bald or balding, with the primarily Anatolian genetic heritage of an isolated Alpine community, carrying a copper axe that marked his status, full of pain and still climbing the mountains he had known all his life, eating his last meal in the alpine hollow where someone shot him from behind and left him to be found by a pair of German hikers fifty-three centuries later.

The DNA changed important parts of the story.