History & Archaeology

For more than three decades, Ötzi the Iceman has been a kind of time capsule for researchers—an Alpine body preserved so well that it keeps producing scientific “firsts.” Now, a new analysis suggests Ötzi carried a high-risk strain of human papillomavirus, HPV16, and that the virus may have been circulating in modern humans far earlier than many models assumed. Live Science The finding matters because HPV16 is one of the best-known “oncogenic” (cancer-linked) HPV types today, and its deep evolutionary history is still debated. If HPV16 really shows up in ancient modern human genomes separated by tens of thousands of years, it raises awkward questions for the popular theory that the virus entered modern humans primarily via Neanderthal interbreeding explains