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

39 points by ilamont 7mo ago

kitd 7mo ago
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-reaches-back-300-generations-to-a-cheddar-cave-1271542.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-family-link-that-reac...
- vkou 7mo ago
  That man is a direct descendant. The man in the article is not.
  - plz_throw 7mo ago
    That man 'CAN' be a dirct descendant, the man in the article 'CAN' also be a direct descendant but you can not say it definitely. If your mother has children with another man, her grandchildren in that lineage will have the same maternal lineage as you, but that does not make them your descendants.
- rich_sasha 7mo ago
  Reading the article, it seems a little crazy. They extracted the DNA, then tested... 20 people locally, and found a match??? It either means there are lots and lots of descendants, a bit like with Genghis Khan, or it's a fluke of galactic proportions. Still, cool story!
vkou 7mo ago
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.
netsharc 7mo ago
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-verwandt/a-19559741 https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi...
- alephnerd 7mo ago
  > use AI to write this article While I understand you retracted your assumption that someone used AI to write their response, I feel the increasingly gratuitous leveling of "AI Ghostwriting" accusations is detrimental to HN and writing as a whole - plenty of humans can write write in cohesive passive tense (and in fact, plenty of us who did really well in our writing classes do so), and more critically, if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI? And more fundamentally, ghostwriting has been the norm for decades, and something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.
  - bediger4000 7mo ago
    I feel like it's appropriate to call out slopstyle articles. Truthful or not, slopstyle should be discouraged, same as Linkedinfluencer style should be discouraged. Neither style encourages succint communication.
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      How do people define what is slop and what isn't?
ninjagoo 7mo ago
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.
cozzyd 7mo ago
Caleb Williams?

39 points by ilamont 7mo ago

kitd 7mo ago

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-reaches-back-300-generations-to-a-cheddar-cave-1271542.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-family-link-that-reac...

vkou 7mo ago
That man is a direct descendant. The man in the article is not.
- plz_throw 7mo ago
  That man 'CAN' be a dirct descendant, the man in the article 'CAN' also be a direct descendant but you can not say it definitely. If your mother has children with another man, her grandchildren in that lineage will have the same maternal lineage as you, but that does not make them your descendants.
rich_sasha 7mo ago
Reading the article, it seems a little crazy. They extracted the DNA, then tested... 20 people locally, and found a match??? It either means there are lots and lots of descendants, a bit like with Genghis Khan, or it's a fluke of galactic proportions. Still, cool story!

vkou 7mo ago

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.

netsharc 7mo ago

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-verwandt/a-19559741 https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi...

alephnerd 7mo ago
> use AI to write this article While I understand you retracted your assumption that someone used AI to write their response, I feel the increasingly gratuitous leveling of "AI Ghostwriting" accusations is detrimental to HN and writing as a whole - plenty of humans can write write in cohesive passive tense (and in fact, plenty of us who did really well in our writing classes do so), and more critically, if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI? And more fundamentally, ghostwriting has been the norm for decades, and something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.
- bediger4000 7mo ago
  I feel like it's appropriate to call out slopstyle articles. Truthful or not, slopstyle should be discouraged, same as Linkedinfluencer style should be discouraged. Neither style encourages succint communication.
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    How do people define what is slop and what isn't?

ninjagoo 7mo ago

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.

cozzyd 7mo ago

Caleb Williams?