2023-08-16 17:09:49
In the South Tyrolean Museum of Archeology in Bolzano there is a now famous sculpture. It is a reconstruction of “Ötzi”, the man from the Copper Age, whose glacier mummy was found on the Tisenjoch in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. This mummy is the main attraction of the museum, but a little unsightly despite being in fantastic condition from an archaeological point of view. During the 5,110 to 5,340 years in the ice, all the body hair on Ötzi’s skin had come off. So that visitors can better imagine what the man, who was around 45 years old at the time of his death and therefore quite old for his time, might have looked like, the Dutch paleo artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis made the reconstruction in 2011, removing all the hair individually with a needle implanted in the scalp made of silicone.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Editor in the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.
The Kennis brothers might have gone to a little less trouble here if it had been known at the time what a new analysis from Ötzi’s genome. It’s in the journal today Cell Genomics appeared, and the authors around Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and Albert Zink from the Bozen Institute for Mummy Research draw the conclusion there, among other things: The Iceman had the genetic disposition for a bald head.
#News #genome #glacier #mummy #Ötzi