Ötzi the iceman (herein spelled as Otzi so I don't have to try and figure out the diacritics every time I type it) is one of the oldest naturally occurring human mummies, and curiously, is from Europe in the Alps, so presumably he has some connection to modern Europeans and diaspora Europeans like ourselves here in America and elsewhere. He dates to the Chalcolithic, about 3300 BC. Otzi was a reasonably elderly man for the Chalcolithic, about 45, and appears to have been killed; an arrow wound in his shoulder, as well as other wounds, look to have been inflicted shortly before his death. Because he was high in what are today the Italian/Austrian border in the Alps, his body froze shortly after his death, and stayed there in a glacier for five thousand years, to be discovered by hiking tourists, of all people.
Other hints from his body suggest that he may have been involved in copper smelting; relatively high levels of copper and arsenic (to make arsenical bronze?) were found on and around his body. He predates the intrusion of the Western Steppe Herder ancestry, so is unlikely to have anything to do with the Indo-Europeanization of Europe at all. In fact, his Y-DNA haplogroup is uncommon in Europe today, but was common among the Early European Farmers, and probably arrived with them earlier in the Neolithic. His specific clade is especially uncommon, but is found in isolated places to the south like Corsica and Sardinia in better numbers than it can be found elsewhere, so he probably was a descendant of the early Cardial Ware spread of Neolithic peoples into Europe. Other lingering clades of related G2a lineages can also be found in the mountains of the Italic peninsula, and presumably it was very common across southern Europe at the time. His maternal haplogroup is also extremely rare; in fact, it was named after him, because it was a unique expression.
In that limited sense, no—Otzi is not an ancestor of anyone in Europe; only somewhat more distantly related clades to him are even present in Europe at all, and they are found in extremely low numbers and extremely isolated geographies. Of course, it's not quite that simple, as as fair bit of EEF DNA is present in all Europeans, but most of it comes from female, rather than male lines. What likely happened is that men from other cultures took EEF girls as wives (or concubines, or slaves even) and that's how their ancestry came into our lineages. Because of this transmission process, it's unlikely that you can draw a lineal line to any cultures or languages of Europe today from the Neolithic EEF people. Their cultures and languages probably completely disappeared (with the possible exception of Basque) and even their genetics and physical type were somewhat marginalized across most of Europe, including the Tyrolean region where Otzi was found, except along the actual Mediterranean coastline.
In fact, while I said earlier that the steppe peoples had yet to come to Europe, a mirror image process to this appears to have already been happening with old Mesolithic Western Hunter Gatherer lineages. In the years prior to the Chalcolithic, there was a resurgence of WHG Y-DNA haplogroups across Central Europe. The recent Papac et al. paper on Bohemian genetics over time strongly suggests that what happened was waves of new people from the west, who were a different sect of EEF people, but who had incorporated more WHG DNA, and whom especially had had male DNA resurgences, came into the area and largely replaced the other EEF peoples who were already living there. Now, granted, the Tyrolean Alps are not Bohemia, but Bohemia shouldn't be seen as somehow different than the rest of what was going on in Europe. New cultures, likely speaking new languages (although possibly related to Otzi's) and with male lines that came from the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had probably already marginalized Otzi's people by the time Otzi came along. The Indo-Europeans when they came, did so again, although even more thoroughly. He seems to have led a pretty hard life. He had tons of tattoos. Possibly somewhat romanticized accounts by scientists who have examined him and his gear suggest that he had killed several different people recently and still had their blood in and around his stuff (on one of his arrows, even) and that he may have carried a wounded and bleeding comrade over his shoulder for some time. He was probably killed by the arrow, but other injuries suggest that it didn't put him down right away, or that he had already been involved in fighting before being shot, and was pretty beat up other than the arrow wound, including a relatively serious head wound and a deep cut on his hand. In fact, one scientific team presented evidence that he was on the run, and had been fleeing up and down the mountains for days before being killed, bringing mossy plant remains from lower elevations with him as he desperately scrambled for an escape in the higher altitudes. To prove this, they say pollen embedded (from the air) in the food in his stomach suggests that he had eaten a meal at least 4,000 feet lower just a day or so before fleeing to the heights, where he ate a final meal just an hour or so before being killed right near the tree-line. Take this romanticized narrative with a grain of salt, however. The pollen could well have gotten on his food in any number of other settings, and before this narrative came out, the idea of him being a high altitude shepherd was common—and still quite plausible. As is the idea of him being a copper smelter of some kind, going into the mountains in search of ore.
So who were Otzi's people, then? We're not actually sure. Pinning him to a material culture is difficult. The museum where he is displayed claims he belongs to the Tamins-Carasso-Isera 5 group. I have no idea what this cultural group is; and searching it is circular; it appears to be referenced only with regards to Otzi. Their cultural artefacts seem to be similar to those of the Remedello culture of the Po Valley, however. This is further to the south, but loads of studies suggest that Otzi had been moving northwards in the weeks prior to his death, and probably grew up in the southern area of the Alps, nearer to Remedello. Whether or not that means he was from that culture, or simply traded with and was familiar with them we don't know, but likely if he wasn't from the Remedello culture, then he was from a neighboring and closely related one. Who these people were is unclear, but there is at least some evidence, although it's disputed, that the Etruscans and neighboring Rhaetic people may have been autochthonous (the other proposal is that they crossed the Alps from the north prior to the historical period.) If the former proposal turns out to be true, the Remedello people might be distant ancestors of the Etruscans. It is worth pointing out, however, that the Etruscans, when they emerge, have a fair amount of steppe ancestry, and are often associated with the Villanova culture, which was itself an offshoot (so it's supposed) of the northern Urnfield culture. This is confusing, as both Villanova and Urnfield are also often associated with Indo-European languages, but it's just a reminder that language, genetics, archaeological cultures and historically attested peoples may not all line up as nicely as we'd wish them to. Perhaps the language was associated with autochthonous peoples, but other aspects of the culture and genetics come from the north, making the Etruscans a hybrid of Indo-Europeanized Neolithic holdovers speaking an old Neolithic language still. Sadly, one can only speculate.
Physically, Otzi appears to be a typical Neolithic EEF type guy. He's fairly small and slight; about 5'5" and estimated to have weighed about 110 lbs. Even if he'd been on the run and eating lean for several weeks, that's really thin. My wife (sometimes) weighs 110-120 lbs. at 5'4" and from the perspective of an American, she's a small, thin woman. (Even if she's now older than Otzi was when he died.) Otzi must have looked like a runt. But that's not unusual for the EEF people; it was only the addition of hunter-gatherer genetics that Europeans started getting taller and more robust again after the EEF settlement of the continent. The WSH admixture brought more tallness and robustness. The hunter-gatherers, whether lingering western ones coming from the Atlantic, or Scandinavian ones coming down south during the Chalcolithic, or as a principle component of the western steppe herders coming from the Pontic-Caspian would have all been pretty manly, good-looking chads compared to the spindly EEF men. It's not necessarily necessary to propose all kinds of massacre and rapine scenarios to see EEF women falling into the arms of the various newcomers who's paternal DNA replaced the EEF men's during the late Neolithic, Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age.
There's a lot of confusing and contradictory information about the physical appearance of the various population groups of Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Some people propose that the EEF peoples were early carriers of the alleles for blond hair, blue eyes and light skin. However, other studies contradict that, and certainly every population that today has elevated levels of EEF genetics is dark-haired, brown-eyed and dark-skinned (from a European context, of course. Those who suggest that any ancestral European population were as dark as sub-Saharan Africans have some kind of ideological ax to grind, and the science does not actually support that, as has been pointed out repeatedly by the actual authors of the papers who are sometimes mortified to find their conclusions misrepresented.) It appears Otzi had brown hair (probably with plenty of gray by this point in his life) and brown eyes. I'm personally of the opinion that the modern Sardinians are the best phenotypal analogs to what the EEF population of the Neolithic looked like, by virtue of parsimony. It's possible, of course, that "whiteness" is a relatively recent genetic innovation that spread rapidly at some time after the arrival of the current genotypes that make up modern Europe, but it appears more likely that the hunter-gatherer and western steppe-herder DNA (the latter very heavy in Eastern Hunter-Gatherer already) is the better source of brown/reddish hair, blond hair and light colored eyes. That's a more parsimonious interpretation of the data, at any rate. Otzi was probably rather dark, thin and short, and would have looked like a somewhat malnourished yet physically lean and tough mountain man version of an Italian.
Of course, all of this discussion about whether or not you can draw a lineal straight arrow between modern Europeans and Otzi's people is kind of moot. Even if you could, although it looks like we cannot, it's fair to say that if he were a pre-Corded Ware individual closely related to the formation of the Nordic Bronze Age and the Germanic peoples, of whom the Anglo-Saxons (and eventually the Americans) are an off-shoot of, that his life would still be completely alien and foreign to us. Regardless of the fact that his culture, language and genetics would have been directly ancestral to ours. He probably would have even looked kind of foreign, and he certainly would have acted it and dressed it. If he'd practiced skull deformation, he might have really looked alien. It's hard to imagine how alien it would have been, and we'd be tempted to try and fit the familiar into it when it doesn't really fit. The excellent work by Dan Davis, for example, takes this Chalcolithic setting where the Pitted Ware culture (the last lingering Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherer culture), the Battle Axe Culture (a Scandinavian Corded Ware variant) and the Funnelbeaker culture (a northern variant of the EEF horizon, with elevated WHG ancestry, as was common in northern and central Europe of the twilight of the EEF cultures) are all coexistent—it's a great setting idea for a fantasy novel, but without any frame of reference to how these people might have thought, believed or acted, he has been adopting Greek mythology into this setting, with analogs to Perseus and Heracles specifically.
Anyway, I'll end there on a plug for Davis' work. Go check it out. It's pretty interesting stuff, and he's a great guy. I've interacted with him a bit in the comments section of various YouTube channels related to Indo-European archaeology, like Genos Historia, Survive the Jive and his own channel as well. I like him.
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