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Ötzi the Iceman's DNA Reveals a Living Relative 5k Years Later

38 points by ilamont

by kitd

2 subcomments

There's a similar story about a modern relative of Cheddar Man, this one going back 10000 years. Even more incredibly, the modern relative lives just down the road from where the ancient ancestor was found.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-family-link-that-reac...

by netsharc

2 subcomments

Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it.
Edit: ah, it helps to read the press release properly, the research was done by by this company, so it makes sense that they're the primary source and that the marketing manager (and probably AI) wrote the article. I retract the accusation I've made below.
Digging into it further, googling "ötzi heddi abbad" I just find Dead Internet results leading back to this -- dare I say it -- hallucinated article. The image caption refers to "Augustin Ochsenreiter" but it seems he's just a general Ötzi researcher and his name is mentioned for the image credit.
This article from a German news service (I can trust this more than FamilyTreeDNA's marketing specialist) mentions that Ötzi has many relatives in Europe, but from the father's lineage: https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi...

by ninjagoo

0 subcomment

It's just amazing that DNA survived the ravages of such a long time, and even more amazing that human technology can use this to identify relatives so far apart in time or space. And then the wonders of DNA itself, what an absolutely mind-blowing bit of nature. Thinking about the structure of the universe, from quarks and fundamental particles to the large scale structures seen through telescopes, that's just wild. And then there's the ability of our mind to perceive and imagine and wonder about this .... no words.

by vkou

0 subcomment

The modern man was not a descendant of Otzi - he just had a common ancestor that lived two thousand years before Otzi.
If you go far enough back, I am also a relative of Otzi, through mitochondrial Eve. I can tell you this with absolute certainty without giving my DNA to some for-profit.

by cozzyd

0 subcomment