I heard! .....I am not sure I entirely buy it, tbh; the stories I saw said they were matching on a 'rare mutation', but.... the same mutation, even a rare one, can happen many times independently in a large enough population, and when you're doing something like searching a large data set for *any* match, it's pretty easy to get a false positive on something like that.
(Also there's a completely different set of genetic studies that say he was probably infertile, so even if they're related they're probably not direct descendants.)
But I haven't read the paper yet! Maybe if I actually read the paper they've factored that in and it'll convince me. I suspect the paper will agree with me, though - the one direct quote I've found from a study author was "the chances [they are descended from Otzi] are so extremely low that I would be tempted to say no," Parson said. "There are just too many other possibilities." (Ah, popular science reporting, why are you so universally terrible......)
ETA: Here's the paper citation: Burkhard Berger, Harald Niederstätter, Daniel Erhart, Christoph Gassner, Harald Schennach, Walther Parson, High resolution mapping of Y haplogroup G in Tyrol (Austria), Forensic Science International: Genetics, Volume 7, Issue 5, September 2013, Pages 529-536, ISSN 1872-4973, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fsigen.2013.05.013.
I got that by finding one article with the journal name and one with an author name and then finding a likely-looking article in the journal with the right author. Searching on "Otzi relatives" gets me hundreds and hundreds of recent posts with the news story; searching on the paper title + Otzi gets me... three results. WHY DOES NOBODY EVER CITE THE ACTUAL PAPER, it took me all of five minutes and I don't have academic access to help me.
....I really need to re-start my blog making fun of bad science journalism if I'm ranting about it in random journal comments again....
no subject
(Also there's a completely different set of genetic studies that say he was probably infertile, so even if they're related they're probably not direct descendants.)
But I haven't read the paper yet! Maybe if I actually read the paper they've factored that in and it'll convince me. I suspect the paper will agree with me, though - the one direct quote I've found from a study author was "the chances [they are descended from Otzi] are so extremely low that I would be tempted to say no," Parson said. "There are just too many other possibilities." (Ah, popular science reporting, why are you so universally terrible......)
ETA: Here's the paper citation:
Burkhard Berger, Harald Niederstätter, Daniel Erhart, Christoph Gassner, Harald Schennach, Walther Parson, High resolution mapping of Y haplogroup G in Tyrol (Austria), Forensic Science International: Genetics, Volume 7, Issue 5, September 2013, Pages 529-536, ISSN 1872-4973, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fsigen.2013.05.013.
I got that by finding one article with the journal name and one with an author name and then finding a likely-looking article in the journal with the right author. Searching on "Otzi relatives" gets me hundreds and hundreds of recent posts with the news story; searching on the paper title + Otzi gets me... three results. WHY DOES NOBODY EVER CITE THE ACTUAL PAPER, it took me all of five minutes and I don't have academic access to help me.
....I really need to re-start my blog making fun of bad science journalism if I'm ranting about it in random journal comments again....