{"id":63,"date":"2008-11-17T22:00:30","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T22:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/?p=63"},"modified":"2009-02-18T05:12:57","modified_gmt":"2009-02-18T05:12:57","slug":"research-an-ancient-mummy-has-no-modern-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/2008\/11\/research-an-ancient-mummy-has-no-modern-children\/","title":{"rendered":"Research an Ancient mummy has no modern children:"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 5,300 year old human mummy – dubbed \u00d6etzi<\/strong> or ‘the Tyrolean Iceman<\/strong>‘ – is highly unlikely to have modern day relatives, according to new research <\/strong>published today.<\/p>\n

A team comprising scientists from Italy and the UK has sequenced \u00d6etzi’s<\/a> entire mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome – which is passed down through the maternal line – and found that he belonged to a genetic lineage that is either extremely rare, or that has died out.\"Ancient
\nPublished in this month’s issue of Current Biology, the research has generated the oldest complete Homo sapiens mtDNA genome to date, and overturns previous research conducted in 1994 on a small section of \u00d6etzi’s mtDNA, which suggested that relatives of \u00d6etzi may still exist in Europe.<\/p>\n

“Changes arise only gradually in mitochondrial DNA as it is passed down the generations,” says co-author Professor Martin Richards of the University of Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences, “and so it provides an effective way of tracking ancestry through the female line across many thousands of years, as well as examining evolutionary relatedness across human populations.”<\/p>\n

The team, led by Professor Franco Rollo at the University of Camerino and Dr Luca Ermini working at both Camerino and Leeds, used powerful new technologies to sequence \u00d6etzi’s mtDNA <\/strong>and match it with a modern day haplogroup – in genetic terms, a group that shares a common ancestral DNA sequence. He belonged to a branch of haplogroup K1, which is still common throughout Europe today. However, almost all members of K1 sampled from modern Europeans belong to one of three sub-lineages, whereas \u00d6etzi’s lineage was completely distinct.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 5,300 year old human mummy – dubbed \u00d6etzi or ‘the Tyrolean Iceman‘ – is highly unlikely to have modern day relatives, according to new research published today. A team comprising scientists from Italy and the UK has sequenced \u00d6etzi’s entire mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome – which is passed down through the maternal line – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[107],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-archaeology","tag-oetzi-mummy-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatarchaeology.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}