Iceman family alive and well

14 October 2013 - 03:00 By ©The Daily Telegraph
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Austrian scientists believe they have found the descendants of a human mummy, 5300 years after he died and was preserved in ice high on a glacier in the Austrian Alps.

Experts from Innsbruck Medical University compared DNA samples taken from the mummy, nicknamed Otzi, with those taken from 3700 blood donors in the Tyrol region of Austria.

"We found 19 men have the same ancestry as Otzi," said Walther Parson, the forensic scientist who carried out the study. "These men and the Tyrolean Iceman had the same ancestors."

Preserved in ice, Otzi was found by two German tourists in the Otztal Alps in 1991. At first it was thought it was the corpse of a mountaineer or a soldier from World War 1 but Otzi became a scientific sensation when tests revealed he died over 5000 years ago.

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