[djf]

True, in a sense. Mitochondria come from the egg, and they have their own DNA, all the mito that you and any of your sibling have came from your mother. And unless a mutation has occurred in you or your siblings, it is the same. But still, a match would mean he was a cousin or an uncle, that sort of thing.

[LocalYokel]

Regarding the Ice Man’s current relatives, they’ve already been located in England. In the book The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes he documents the analysis of the mitochondral DNA from populations all across Europe and traces them to seven different women from different time periods. The Ice Man was discovered as he was finalizing his research and he realized he might have the match for a living descendant in his data. He searched and found a match in a young schoolboy in rural England.

"Sykes begins with the story of how he was able to identify a living descendant of the five-thousand year old "ice man" found in northern Italy in 1994 by comparing mitochondrial DNA sequences. Mitochondrial DNA is contained only in egg cells (thus, "Eve" and her daughters), not in sperm cells, and transmitted without recombination so that the changes are all the result of mutations that occur at a predictable rate over time."

It's a great book.