Researchers Sequence Whole Genome of Ancient Egyptian

[Judi Lynn]

Jul 2, 2025 by News Staff

An international team of scientists has sequenced the whole genome from an adult male Egyptian who lived between over 4,500 years ago — a few centuries after Egyptian unification, bridging the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods.



Nebamun hunting in the marshes with his wife and daughter, part of a wall painting from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun, Thebes, New Kingdom, 1350 BC. Image credit: Werner Forman Archive / Bridgeman Images.


“Forty years have passed since the early pioneering attempts to retrieve DNA from mummies without successful sequencing of an ancient Egyptian genome,” said co-senior author Dr. Pontus Skoglund, a researcher at the Francis Crick Institute.

“Ancient Egypt is a place of extraordinary written history and archaeology, but challenging DNA preservation has meant that no genomic record of ancestry in early Egypt has been available for comparison.”

“Building on this past research, new and powerful genetic techniques have allowed us to cross these technical boundaries and rule out contaminating DNA, providing the first genetic evidence for potential movements of people in Egypt at this time.”

In the study, the researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the tooth of an individual from Nuwayrat, a village 265 km south of Cairo.

More:https://www.sci.news/genetics/ancient-egyptian-genome-14039.html

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By analyzing his genetic code, they 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 finding is genetic evidence that people moved into Egypt and mixed with local populations at this time, which was previously only visible in archaeological artifacts.