Facial reconstruction of the individual from Nuwayrat using 3D scan data of the skull and analysis of the bones. Credit: Caroline Wilkinson, Liverpool John Moores University.
In a world first, researchers have extracted and sequenced DNA from an Egyptian male who lived around 4,500 to 4,800 years ago—the age of the first pyramids.
Previously, extracted DNA from that time period has been too contaminated to add to the genomic record. However, this burial took place before artificial mummification was standard practice, most likely helping to preserve the DNA. That, in addition to today’s innovative genetic techniques, have now combined to reveal the first whole genome from ancient Egypt.
The international research team also analyzed the man’s teeth and other evidence from his skeleton, reveling more information on his ancestry and lifestyle.
For the study, published in Nature, the research team extracted DNA from the tooth of a male buried in Nuwayrat, a village 265 km south of Cairo. The man died at some point in the overlap between two periods in Egyptian history, the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods, and had been buried in a ceramic pot in a tomb cut into the hillside.
The man’s genetic code showed that most of his ancestry mapped to ancient individuals who lived in North Africa. The remaining 20% of his ancestry could be traced to ancient individuals who lived in the Fertile Crescent, particularly an area called Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq).
This data supports the idea that people moved into Egypt and mixed with local populations around this time—something previously only supported by archaeological artifacts.
“This individual has been on an extraordinary journey. He lived and died during a critical period of change in ancient Egypt, and his skeleton was excavated in 1902 and donated to World Museum Liverpool, where it then survived bombings during the Blitz that destroyed most of the human remains in their collection. We’ve now been able to tell part of the individual’s story, finding that some of his ancestry came from the Fertile Crescent, highlighting mixture between groups at this time,” said Linus Girdland Flink, Lecturer in Ancient Biomolecules at the University of Aberdeen, Visiting Researcher at LJMU and co-senior author.
By analyzing chemical signals in the man’s teeth, the researchers found that the individual had likely grown up in Egypt. They then used evidence from his skeleton to estimate sex, age, height, and information on ancestry and lifestyle. These signs suggested he could have worked as a potter or in a trade requiring comparable movements as his bones had muscle markings from sitting for long periods with outstretched limbs.
“Though circumstantial, these clues point towards pottery, including use of a pottery wheel, which arrived in Egypt around the same time,” explains Joel Irish, Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Liverpool John Moores University and second author. “That said, his higher-class burial is not expected for a potter, who would not normally receive such treatment. Perhaps he was exceptionally skilled or successful to advance his social status.”
While an impressive “first,” the researchers caution that many more individual genome sequences would be needed to fully understand variation in ancestry in Egypt at the time. Still, this possibility exceptionally skilled man is the oldest Egyptian to have his genome sequenced to date. In the future, the research team said they hope to build a bigger picture of migration and ancestry in collaboration with Egyptian researchers.