The modern populations with the most direct genetic continuity with Ötzi and his contemporaries are the Sardinians. Sardinia, as an island with relatively limited Bronze Age immigration, retained higher proportions of Neolithic farmer ancestry than most of continental Europe. The comparison between Ötzi’s genome and modern Sardinians in the 2012 study — Sardinians were the closest modern population to Ötzi genetically — reflects this shared ancestry from the Anatolian farming expansion.
But the specific population of the Alpine valleys in the fourth millennium BCE, with its unusually high farmer ancestry, was eventually diluted by the same steppe expansion that transformed the rest of Europe. The modern populations of South Tyrol and the broader Alpine region carry the typical mixture of hunter-gatherer, early farmer, and steppe herder ancestry that characterizes most modern Europeans — not the near-pure early farmer ancestry that characterized Ötzi.
This transformation happened over centuries, through a combination of migration, intermarriage, and the demographic success of incoming populations. The community that Ötzi belonged to did not simply disappear — the genetics of that region today show that early farmer ancestry persists, as a component in the mixture — but it was substantially reshaped by the Bronze Age influx.
The 19 modern Tyrolean men who share Y chromosome haplogroup G2a2b with Ötzi represent the paternal-line descendant thread running from that Copper Age community to the present. They carry an unchanged paternal chromosome through five thousand years — but the rest of their genomes, like those of their neighbors, reflect all the population changes that have occurred since.