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posted by martyb on Saturday July 01 2017, @08:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the DNA-Surprises dept.

A team consisting of people from the University of Tübingen, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the University of Cambridge, the Museum and Institute of Zoology (Polish Academy of Sciences), the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory and the University of Adelaide has recently published a very interesting genetic study of ancient Egyptian mummies in Nature.

According to the authors, previous studies suffered from possible contamination due to the type of method used: direct PCR and it was generally believed that the climate and mode of mummification destroyed any chance of finding good human DNA.

The authors studied 150 mummified individuals using a high-throughput DNA sequencing method and selecting 90 individuals for further study. The samples obtained span around 1,300 years of Ancient Egypt, namely the Pre-Ptolemaic (New Kingdom, Third Intermediate Period and Late Period), Ptolemaic and Roman periods.

The authors’ conclusion was:

We find that all three ancient Egyptian groups cluster together, supporting genetic continuity across our 1,300-year transect. Both analyses reveal higher affinities with modern populations from the Near East and the Levant compared to modern Egyptians.

One interesting note is: While this result by itself does not exclude the possibility of much older and continuous gene flow from African sources, the substantially lower African component in our ∼2,000-year-old ancient samples suggests that African gene flow in modern Egyptians occurred indeed predominantly within the last 2,000 years.

Basically, if the population studied is representative of the all of the people in Ancient Egypt, the conclusion is that they were not Africans and that modern Egyptians share more genes with African populations than their ancestors.


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