When Frank Maixner’s team reconstructed Ötzi the Iceman’s 5,300-year-old stomach bacterium in 2016, the Helicobacter pylori strain looked less like modern Europe’s hybrid form than Asian lineages common today in South and Central Asia, leaving a migration signal no pot or stone tool could have shown (opens in new tab)

In 2016, an international team led by Frank Maixner reconstructed a 5,300-year-old Helicobacter pylori genome from the stomach contents of Ötzi the Iceman, the Copper Age mummy frozen into the Alps near the modern border of Italy and Austria. The bacterium was not a modern European hybrid. It was a nearly pure representative of an […]