It removed an error that had made Ötzi seem genetically anomalous for his time.

It clarified that he was instead exactly what his time and place would produce — a man of the isolated Alpine valleys, carrying the genetic heritage of the first European farmers without the subsequent mixing that would transform the genetics of lowland Europe.

And it revised, significantly and specifically, the popular image of what he looked like.

But the DNA also confirmed what the archaeology had always shown: this was a real person who lived a real life in a real world that was, in its essential human dimensions, recognizable from the vantage point of five thousand years later.

He had health problems and skills and equipment and enemies and the human vulnerability that is every person’s inheritance.