Dienekes points me to the fact that Ewen Callaway has the dirt on what’s going on with Ötzi:
To get a better grip on his ancestry and predisposition to disease, Albert Zink, head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman in Bolzano, and his team sequenced Ötzi’s 3 billion base pair nuclear genome from a shard of hip bone. Their sequence covers more than 90 percent of the Iceman’s genome. Their team also analysed DNA preserved in Ötzi’s stomach in hopes of revealing the microbes that colonized his gut.
Zink says his team is keeping most of the results of these studies under wraps, pending publication. They had hoped to have the paper out in time for last week’s Mummy Congress and a television special called Iceman Murder Mystery.
His team plans to use the sequence to determine Ötzi’s status for genetic variations linked to diseases in modern humans, particularly arthrosclerosis. A full nuclear genome will also paint a more detailed picture of the Iceman’s ancestry and his relationship to present-day humans. Zink’s team will ask whether Ötzi is an ancestor of people living in Central Europe today, or whether he and his kin died out and were replaced by migrants from elsewhere, such as the Middle East. To buff up this analysis, they are analysing DNA preserved in the skeletons of other ancient inhabitants of central Europe.
~90 percent of a genome is way more than you’d need for some basic analysis and inference of relationships to contemporary populations. So what’s the big deal? No idea, but this tardiness makes me turn the needle up in terms of assuming that they found some interesting stuff. If it’s what you’d expect, why recheck and beef up your analysis with as much support as you can find? Of course, I hope that they found some interesting stuff, so I shouldn’t trust my own judgments in this area. My own suspicion is that they have found extensive genetic turnover over the past 6,000 years in Western Europe, and they are using modern and ancient samples to flesh-out their model. The two dominant paternal haplogroups in Europe today, R1a and R1b, are suspiciously scarce in the ancient DNA samples.