His bone composition — which reflects the last several years of life rather than childhood — showed a different isotopic signature, suggesting he had been living in a higher-altitude environment or in valleys with different geological characteristics than his childhood home. The comparison between tooth enamel and bone isotopes allows researchers to track not just where someone grew up but whether they moved in adulthood — and Ötzi had moved.
The picture that emerges from isotope evidence is of a man who grew up in the lower Eisack valley, later moved to higher valleys or different regions, and in his final years was living and working in an Alpine environment consistent with the valleys north of his childhood home.
This movement pattern is consistent with what is known archaeologically about Copper Age Alpine communities. Pastoralism — the herding of domestic animals between lower valleys in winter and higher summer pastures — was an established practice in the Alps in this period, and the genetic evidence in the animals Ötzi wore suggests access to domesticated livestock. The isotope evidence supports the picture of a person embedded in a mobile pastoral economy that used multiple altitude zones across the year.
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## Ötzi’s Population and the Question of Where They Went
The 2023 genomic study placed Ötzi within a specific population context, but it also raised a question about the people he represented and what happened to them.
The Alpine Copper Age communities of the fourth millennium BCE — with their unusually high Anatolian farmer ancestry and limited hunter-gatherer admixture — were not simply absorbed without change into the later European population. The Bronze Age steppe expansion that began around 2900–2500 BCE transformed European population genetics dramatically. Within a few centuries, steppe herder ancestry became the dominant ancestry component in many northern and central European populations, and even southern European populations showed significant steppe contributions.