The very first whole genome of an ancient Egyptian reveals what life looked like 4,800 years ago
How was it to live in ancient Egypt at a time of change of sweeping? Although we cannot put ourselves in the place of ancient Egyptians, we know at least how one of them may have experienced now that an entire genome of ancient Egypt was sequenced for the first time.
A study recently published in Nature Details the revolutionary genetic progression, and all thanks to a man who lived around 4,500 to 4,800 years, when Egypt was in full transition from the early dynastic period of the ancient kingdom. The genome of this anonymous person – who worked intense work as a potter – alone granted researchers a broader perspective on ancient Egyptian identity.
Disentangle ancient Egyptian DNA
It is not exactly under the wraps that Ancient Egypt has been a research subject for centuries. Mummies have particularly fascinated researchers, including an evolutionary geneticist Svante PääboWell known in the scientific community for his work on the Neanderthal genome.
In fact, mummies was Pääbo’s ticket in the field of scalable genetics forty years ago, when he recovered the DNA from mummy specimens which were about 2000 years old. Quick advance until today, and DNA technology has improved considerably, allowing researchers to obtain the first whole genome from ancient Egypt.
According to a press statement In the new study, the researchers led to this DNA genome that they extracted from the tooth of a buried man in Nuwayrat, a village at 265 km (around 165 miles) in the south of Cairo. It was buried in a grave on a hillside before mummification was a standard practice. It may actually have helped preserve its DNA, as chemicals Used in mummification, such as sodium carbonate, degrade DNA.
Find out more: King Tut’s muddy family tree was full of incest and intrigue
Genetic change in a turbulent era
With radiocarbon dating, the researchers determined that man lived during a transition period between the first dynastics and ancient Egypt. The dynastic period, according to the researchers, was a dramatic period of Egyptian history, featuring wars, an occupation by foreign leaders and episodes of political collapse.
The researchers say that these conditions would have laid the basis of changes in the genetic structure of the Egyptian people. The archaeological evidence of the period had already suggested that ancient Egypt had exchanges of goods and ideas all around the fertile crescent, and the genome of the man buried with Nuwayrat has further solidified this idea.
The researchers analyzed the genetic code of man, noting that most of his ancestors were linked to individuals who lived in North Africa. However, 20% of its ancestry could be attributed to people who lived in Mesopotamia (around modern Iraq)
This validates the idea that people moved to Egypt and mix with local populations, modifying the genetic landscape. Researchers note, however, that more sequences of individual genomes would be necessary to fully understand the variation in ancestry during this period of Egyptian history.
“Assembling all the indices of the DNA, bones and teeth of this individual allowed us to build a complete image,” said the first author Adeline Morez Jacobs, a former postdoctoral researcher at the Francis Crick Institute. “We hope that future DNA samples of ancient Egypt can develop when this Western Asian movement has started precisely.”
A worker potter
As for the daily life of man, he probably worked in pottery or another profession requiring similar movements. The marks on his bones, his signs of outstretched arms and arthritis in the right foot suggest that he can sit and work with a pot of pottery.
Interestingly, he also had a higher class burial, indicated by the placement of his body in a large pottery ship. This post-mortem privilege was generally not granted to the potters, but the researchers say that it may have been able to climb the social scale by being exceptionally qualified in its work.
Find out more: Ancient Egyptians also had a bad posture at work
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Jack Knudson is a deputy editor -in -chief to discover with a strong interest in environmental sciences and history. Before joining Discover in 2023, he studied journalism at the Ohio University Scripps College of Communication and previously interned at recycling Today Magazine
