2023-08-17 14:55:39
Murat Yıldırım, Vienna
About 5300 years ago, a man was wandering over the “Tisenjoch” mountain in South Tyrol. Tyrol was divided into south and north after the First World War! The southern side is in Italy, the northern side is in Austria, and in Tirol, which is divided into these two countries, mostly German-speaking Austrians live!
5,300 years ago, this Anatolian man was killed by an arrow and naturally preserved in ice until he was found in 1991. This glacier mummy is officially older than the Egyptian pyramids. Our fellow countryman of Anatolian origin, named ÖTZİ, lived in the Copper Age at the end of the Stone Age. It was determined that he used tools made of stone, but also carried an ax made of copper. These tools were found with him when he was found among the glaciers! It is easy to say that he was 5300 years old and his name was ÖTZİ, but now there are headlines in the Anatolian and even Austrian press saying that our ÖTZİ has turned out to be a Turk. Were there Turks in Anatolia 5300 years ago? Proto Turks existed not only in Anatolia but throughout Europe.
How was it found?
The mummy was discovered in 1991 by mountaineers among the ice in the mountain in the Tyrol Province on Austria’s border with Italy – a sensational find that the world press wrote about, and because it was within the borders of Austria, it was called Ötzi! „The Iceman“ has been exhibited in the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano (Italy) since 1998.
The mummy is stored in a specially designed cooled room and can be viewed through a small window.
The glacier man kept his frozen secret for over 30 years. Dozens of scientists, criminologists, artists and archaeologists have tried to create a picture of what Ötzi once looked like. They were all wrong in their assumptions.
He had neither long shaggy hair nor stubble. There were no blue eyes or light skin. Archaeogeneticist Johannes Krause says these are incorrect speculations. Together with his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, he reanalyzed the glacier mummy’s genome. It was better and more accurate than any previous attempt.
Johannes Krause kim?
Johannes Krause (born 1980, Leinefelde) is a German biochemist who conducts research on historical infectious diseases and human evolution. Since 2013, he has been working as Professor of Archeo and Palaeogenetics at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. Krause has been one of five directors of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig since mid-2020.
Johannes Krause explains the results of his research as follows:
Ötzi had Anatolian ancestors and dark skin. In addition, he was probably bald. Genes also predispose to type 2 diabetes and obesity, but this probably did not occur thanks to a healthy lifestyle. Krause published the results together with Albert Zink, head of mummy research at Eurac Research in Bolzano, and other researchers in the journal „Cell Genomics“.
Ötzi’s last meal had high fat content
By analyzing the stomach contents of a glacier mummy, mummy researchers from Eurac Research have gained new insights into diet and food preparation 5,300 years ago.
Fresh or dried game from ibex and red deer, einkorn and traces of poisonous bracken: this was the composition of Ötzi’s last meal. In an international study led by researchers at the Bolzano-based Eurac Research centre, scientists examined the stomach contents of a glacier mummy for biomolecules such as proteins, lipids and carbohydrates and their origins.
Thanks to the results obtained, researchers were able to reconstruct a Copper Age meal for the first time. The results of the study were recently published in the famous journal “Current Biology”.
The iceman must have felt safe just before he died. He had eaten a substantial meal two hours to half an hour before his death. The high fat content in Ötzi’s fully-filled stomach surprised researchers. Oil is very different from other substances because it does not retain water. Therefore, it was learned that high fat content can be seen with the naked eye. Detailed lipid analysis later confirmed that it was fat of animal origin, specifically adipose tissue from mountain goats. Ötzi seems to be aware that fats are an excellent source of energy. The high mountain environment (3,210 m) where the iceman lived and where he was found 5,300 years after his death poses a particular challenge for human physiology. To prevent a rapid loss of energy, optimal nutrients must be supplied. Ötzi’s last meal was a balanced mixture of carbohydrates, protein and fats – perfectly adapted to the demands of the high mountains
Contaminated DNA samples
Previously, in 2012, Ötzi’s genetic material was fully analyzed by an international research team. At that time, Johannes Krause was still specializing in Neanderthals. He was 32 years old! As a doctoral student, he studied under Leipzig Nobel Prize winner Svante Pääbo.
Krause distrusted the old analyses. It is noteworthy that in his speech about his suspicions at that time, he stated that something was wrong! “Today’s Europeans carry, among other things, the genes of hunter-gatherers tens of thousands of years ago,” Krause said. Previous analyzes also found that 7.5 percent of Ötzi’s genes came from cattle nomads in the southern Eurasian steppes. However, Ötzi lived in the Southern Alps long before the steppe shepherds came to Europe,” explains the reason for his doubts!
All over again!
Therefore, Johannes Krause wanted to examine Ötzi’s genes once again, relying on the precision of his technology in the clean rooms of the Leipzig Institute. In 2016, together with colleagues in Bolzano, they finally managed to obtain a sample of the bone. Only 30 to 40 milligrams of bone, but it was enough.
Krause stated the following on this subject:
„Today, we know from analysis that the DNA we examined belongs to only one person. On the other hand, the analysis in 2012 must have been contaminated with modern-day human DNA. Therefore, many of the conclusions reached at that time are no longer valid. Ötzi did not have Borrelia infection as previously assumed and did not suffer from any other infectious diseases. But compared to its contemporaries, most of its genetic material – 91.4 percent – came from immigrants from Anatolia who brought with them agriculture unknown in Europe. Only 8.6 percent came from European wild hunters. And as expected, nothing came of the Eurasian steppe herders. The time Ötzi’s ancestors came to Europe can now be determined genetically. They must have arrived here 50 generations before him, 6800 years ago, or 1500 years before his lifetime. But if almost nothing has changed in the genetic structure over 50 generations, this allows only one conclusion: the first Anatolian farmers hardly mixed with the people who had already settled here. “
Johannes Krause does not stop there and continues: “However, we did not find any signs of consanguineous marriage. This group apparently consisted of several thousand individuals forming a breeding community.“
Krause: “It came from Anatolia”
Meanwhile, the genomes of a large number of people from the Copper Age have been analyzed. One comparison shows just how extraordinary Ötzi was: Of the hundreds of early European people who lived at the same time as Ötzi and whose genomes are available, Ötzi had the largest share of peasant ancestry.
“Genetically, their ancestors appear to have come directly from Anatolia,” says Johannes Krause. “Ötzi’s skin type, which was already determined as Mediterranean in the first genome analysis, was even darker than previously thought,” he says, drawing attention to the basic information in his scientific research.
It is important that anthropologist Albert Zink from Bolzano said, “This is the darkest skin tone found among European finds from the same period.”
So how can scientists conclude that Ötzi was bald?
“This is also in the genes,” says Zink, and adds: “He says Ötzi’s genes showed a very strong predisposition to baldness. This is a very clear result and may explain why there was almost no hair on the mummy.“
Austria’s Tyrolean Iceman dates back directly to B.C. It is known as one of the oldest human glacial mummies, dating back to 3350-3120 BC.
Zink continues: “A previously published low-coverage genome has provided new insights into European prehistory despite present-day high DNA contamination. Here, we generate a high-coverage genome with low contamination (15.3-fold) to learn more about the genetic background and phenotype of this individual. Unlike previous studies, we found no detectable Steppe-related lineage in the Iceman. Instead, it retained the highest Anatolian-farmer-related ancestry among contemporary European populations, indicating a rather isolated Alpine population with limited gene flow from hunter-gatherer-farmer-related populations. Phenotypic analysis revealed that the Iceman likely had darker skin than modern-day Europeans and carried risk alleles associated with male pattern baldness, type 2 diabetes, and obesity-related metabolic syndrome. “These results support phenotypic observations such as high pigmentation of the skin of the preserved mummified body and the absence of hair on the head.” (yenivatan.at)
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