A new study untangles the complex microbial history of Ötzi the Iceman, revealing which microorganisms originated during his lifetime and which arrived long after his death. For more than 5,000 years, Ötzi the Iceman has carried an invisible community of microbes through ice, time, and modern museum preservation. Now, scientists have taken the most detailed [...]
Ötzi the Iceman, Europe’s most famous mummy, is crawling with microbes, some long dead, some still eking out a living after thousands of years, and some very modern.
After he died in the Ötztal Alps, the Copper Age man now known as Ötzi lay alone and forgotten for 5,300 years, until a group of hikers stumbled on his freeze-dried remains in 1991. Since then, he’s received a lot of attention from scientists, who have sequenced his DNA, pored over his last meal and the remains of his gut microbes, and examined his clothes and his broken tools. Today, Ötzi lies in a high-tech resting place at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy, where, it turns out, his body is still home to a handful of cold-adapted yeast species that have probably been with him since just after he died.
Microbiologist Mohamed S. Sarhan (of the Institute of Mummy Studies at the private Eurac Research center) and his colleagues recently sampled material from Ötzi’s stomach and meltwater from inside his body, swabbed his skin, and even sampled airborne microbes from his frozen storage room and the lab outside it. They also took samples from a block of frozen alpine soil taken from next to Ötzi’s body back in 1991.
© Sarhan et al. 2026
His 5,300-year-old body still hosts cold-loving microbes — and possibly bread-making yeast. 
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