Millennia-old DNA has revealed a genetic link between the cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Researchers reportedly sequenced the genome from two teeth in the skeleton of a man dating back approximately 4,800 years.
Pontus Skoglund, group leader at the Ancient Genomics Laboratory of the Crick Institute, explains the process:
We take a few milligrams, say 20 milligrams, or 1000 grams of a small powder from the skeleton, for example from the tooth in this case, and it's really a sort of thimbleful of powder. It is very important for us to leave the skeleton as intact as possible for cultural heritage purposes, then we put it in liquids to extract the DNA. "
The skeleton was discovered in a sealed pot, inside a chamber carved into a rocky hillside at the Egyptian burial site of Nuwayrat.
Analysis of skeletal wear and the presence of arthritis in some joints indicate that the man was probably around 60 years old and may have worked as a potter, said Joel Irish, a bioarchaeologist at Liverpool John Moores University and co-author of the study.
This man lived just before or near the beginning of the Old Kingdom of Egypt, when Upper and Lower Egypt were unified into a single state, leading to a period of relative political stability and cultural innovation, notably with the construction of the Giza pyramids. Around the same time, Mesopotamia saw the rise of the Sumerian city-states and the emergence of cuneiform as a writing system.
A considerable development, according to Pontus Skoglund : "It's very fascinating because it allows us to take a big step forward in the ancient DNA archives of Egypt. One of the things we are trying to reconstruct is the ancestry of this individual, to which we can link other individuals who lived before him. We have discovered that he had ancestors originating from the Middle East or North Africa. About 80% of his ancestors match those of other North African individuals we know. But the closest people we have are from Morocco. So he is very far removed from Egypt."
Four-fifths of the genome shows links to North Africa and the region around Egypt. One-fifth is linked to the part of Western Asia located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, known as the Fertile Crescent, where Mesopotamian civilization flourished at that time.
"When there are cultural or technological innovations, such as the advent of agriculture, for example, there are also population movements; people move as a result of these large-scale societal changes. And of course, the origins of early Egypt, around 5,000 years ago, were a truly significant and extraordinary event in a sense, and it would be fascinating to be able to understand ancestry and mobility around that period, and of course also before, after, and during Egyptian civilization," explains the group leader at the Ancient Genomics Laboratory.
For more than half a century, scientists have been trying to sequence the genome of ancient Egyptians like that of this man in his sixties, found in 1902 , 20 years before the discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1923.
The researchers also stated that analysis of other ancient DNA samples is necessary to clarify the extent of these cultural links.
