Tutkijat saivat selville vanhimman tunnetun egyptiläisen kokonaiden DNA:n

DNA ja haploryhmä viittasi lähi-itään.

Ancient Egypt went through a period of major change between 4,500-4,800 years ago. The country's Early Dynastic period was transitioning into the Old Kingdom period. 

This saw advances that allowed expert builders in Cairo to construct what would become the Great Pyramid of Giza. It also saw mature hieroglyphic writing and the emergence of the pottery wheel.

South of Cairo, in a village called Nuwayrat, one man lived a hard life as a potter, even with the new technology. But, fortunately, when he died, his body was placed in a ceramic pot and buried in a tomb cut into a hillside, allowing UK-based researchers to analyze his remains, genetically.

Their study, published in the journal Nature, describes the first whole ancient Egyptian genome, and the oldest DNA sample from Egypt to date. 

"This individual lived and died during a critical period of change in Ancient Egypt," said Linus Girdland Flink, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen, in the UK, and co-senior author on the study. Flink and colleagues have revealed how the potter lived and died, and his genetic ancestry. They know he stood 1.6 meters (5.2 feet) tall, had brown eyes and brown hair, and lived to be as old as 64 years. 

"We've been able to tell part of the individual's story, finding that some of his ancestry came from the Fertile Crescent, highlighting a mixing of groups [from North Africa and the Middle East] at this time," said Girdland Flink. The Fertile Crescent was where the first agricultural communities of the Middle East and Mediterranean basin are thought to have settled. It was a crescent-shaped region that spanned modern-day Syria, southeastern Turkey and Iraq. While it is difficult to draw broad conclusions from a single individual, "this groundbreaking article provides a first glimpse into the genetics of early Egypt, a region that has long been a critical gap in the ancient DNA map," said Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist at Harvard University in the US, who was not involved in the study.

https://www.dw.com/en/dna-shows-ancient-egyptians-had-surprising-foreig…