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Whole-genome ancestry of an Old Kingdom Egyptian

(www.nature.com)
149 points A_D_E_P_T | 1 comments | 03 Jul 25 00:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
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eddythompson80 ◴[03 Jul 25 01:51 UTC] No.44450865[source]▶
I'll have to bookmark it for later to spend more time than just skimming, but I find 2 things interesting. The lack of any Egyptian archeologists on most interesting and significant findings about Ancient Egypt is one. The other is the seemingly strong conclusion that Ancient Egyptians did in fact move to Egypt from Mesopotamian which is pretty cool.

Egyptians don't like the notion that "they moved there from somewhere". They claim their own unique, uninterrupted, history and connection to the land as well as their civilizational independence from Mesopotamian, Asia Minor, Europe, and Africa.

It's also the same you rarely find Egyptian archeologists/scholars on scientific papers. While this might be a matter of ancient history and science to everyone, it's a matter of current day politics for Egyptians and especially the Egyptian government. The "findings" of the paper has to agree with the narrative built and proposed by the ministry of antiquities or they will literally charge whoever publishes it with a national crime.

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dr_dshiv ◴[03 Jul 25 06:23 UTC] No.44452191[source]▶
“…the Nuwayrat individual is predicted to have had brown eyes, brown hair and skin pigmentation ranging from dark to black skin, with a lower probability of intermediate skin colour”
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1. A_D_E_P_T ◴[03 Jul 25 08:35 UTC] No.44452909[source]▶
The SI has much more information along these lines, including a facial reconstruction. Our Ancient Egyptian looks basically Arabian -- the closest match is a modern Bedouin.

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...

> Next, according to the CRANID nearest neighbour discriminant analysis, the individual cranium most like Nuwayrat is from a West Asian Bedouin male (Individual 2546 in CRANID database), with the following rounding out the top five: Egyptian 26th-30th Dynasty male (Ind 1034), Indian male (2576), Lachish male (2668), and another 26th-30th Dynasty Egyptian male (1031).

> Thus, in line with the genetic results the Nuwayrat individual, subject to limitations imposed by the comparative samples available in the two program datasets (as above), appears most akin phenetically to: Western Eurasians rather than subSaharan Africans dentally and, more specifically, premodern West Asians, i.e., Lachish, based on craniometrics. It is secondarily most similar in craniometric dimensions to ancient Egyptians of a more recent time.

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