Otzi was a dog!

Ok, I don't know if it's me, but it seems like this Reuters article, is simply stupid. They assert: "Ancient iceman probably has no modern relatives" in the headline. Then they use mtDNA to support this hypothesis. See the problem yet?

I'm going to assert exactly the opposite, and I have even better evidence in my favor, since my hypothesis matches well with how Otzi was killed.

I say Otzi is in fact the ancestor of all native Europeans. The fact that he was bludgeoned and shot with an arrow supports my supposition that in fact he "knocked-up" literally every woman in Europe at the time. The men of Europe subsequently got together, took him up to the mountains and killed him.

The mtDNA supports my hypothesis just as much as it supports theirs. Why you ask? Because mtDNA is passed down matrilineally, so even if Otzi knocked up all the women of Europe as I contend, his mtDNA was never passed down (by him) regardless of how many children he had.

Their research shows that Otzi's mother's mtDNA line probably died out (didn't have enough female descendents), but it really says nothing about Otzi's descendents. To say anything relevant about that, you would need to look at his nuclear DNA. You could even trace his male descendatnts by looking only at his Y-chromosome.

Anyway, I'm done. I see that John Hawks noted the same thing.

Thanks to JeanM. for the "jealous husband" idea.

Cross-posted at Campus Trash because I felt like it.