Background The Iceman mummy, a 5300-year-old natural alpine glacier mummy, provides a unique opportunity to study ancient microbial ecosystems. However, disentangling the mummy’s endogenous microbiome from modern environmental contaminants introduced during three decades of conservation remains a significant challenge. Results By integrating culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches, including amplicon sequencing, shotgun metagenomics and de novo metagenomic assembly, as well as isolate-level genomics, we performed a comprehensive characterization of the Iceman’s microbial landscape. We identified three distinct microbial drivers: endogenous post-mortem succession, ancient glacier-derived relicts, and modern anthropogenic introduction. Metagenomic analysis of internal tissues revealed anaerobic bacteria, including ancient gut taxa, including such as Romboutsia hominis, Clostridium moniliforme, Eubacterium sp., Ruminococcus bromii, Kineothrix sp., Treponema succinifaciens, Enterousia sp., and Huintestinicola butyrica. These taxa, characterized by ancient DNA (aDNA) damage profiles (C to T deamination frequency), show high similarity to ancestral, non-Westernized human gut communities, providing a rare baseline for Copper Age intestinal ecosystems. Conversely, we identified a shift in the external mycobiome, marked by the recent proliferation of psychrophilic yeasts, including Glaciozyma watsonii, Mrakia robertii, Phenoliferia glacialis, and Goffeauzyma sp. While internal bacterial communities remained stable, these external yeast populations showed increased relative abundance and reduced DNA damage signatures between 2010 and 2019, indicating active, modern colonization. Furthermore, strain-level analysis of Pseudomonas sp. 5C2 confirmed that specific environmental strains have successfully colonized the mummy, persisting across multiple tissue sites with minimal genetic divergence.
Conclusions Our study demonstrates that the Iceman is not a static relic but a dynamic biological interface. The coexistence of ancient, endogenous gut microbes and modern, psychrophilic colonizers highlights the potential for ongoing microbial activity even at sub-zero temperatures. These findings underscore that maintaining strict environmental parameters is essential to prevent these specialized microbial communities from transitioning from latent persistence to active microorganisms.
- The Iceman’s microbiome: unveiling millennia of microbial diversity and continuity
- Mohamed Sabry Mohamed Sarhan - Eurac ResearchMarco Samadelli - Eurac ResearchAlbert Zink - Eurac ResearchFrank Maixner - Eurac Research
- Microbiome, Vol.14, 135
- 2049-2618
- 2049-2618
- 14
- BioMed Central
- (EURAC)31632433
991007357455501241 - © The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Institute for Biomedicine
Institute for Mummy Studies - English
- Journal article
- none
- Scientific
- Scientific
- Sarhan MS, Samadelli M, Zink A, Maixner F