Researchers Recover Ancient DNA from Egyptian Mummies

A team of researchers has succeeded in recovering ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies dating from 1400 BCE to 400 CE. This international team of researchers is led by researchers at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. According to the team, they have been able to get first genome-wide nuclear data from three individuals. The study suggested that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations from the Near East. In comparison, modern Egyptians share more ancestry with Sub-Saharan Africans.

In their paper, authors write: “Egypt, located on the isthmus of Africa, is an ideal region to study historical population dynamics due to its geographic location and documented interactions with ancient civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe. Particularly, in the first millennium BCE Egypt endured foreign domination leading to growing numbers of foreigners living within its borders possibly contributing genetically to the local population. Here we present 90 mitochondrial genomes as well as genome-wide data sets from three individuals obtained from Egyptian mummies. The samples recovered from Middle Egypt span around 1,300 years of ancient Egyptian history from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period. Our analyses reveal that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times. This analysis establishes ancient Egyptian mummies as a genetic source to study ancient human history and offers the perspective of deciphering Egypt’s past at a genome-wide level.”

In this study, researchers extracted nuclear DNA from mummies found on the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq, along the Nile River in Middle Egypt. The team then carried out tests in clean room facilities dedicated to ancient DNA research at the University of Tübingen. The samples were UV irradiated for an hour and then the surface of the bone or tissue samples was removed.

In total, the authors recovered mitochondrial genomes from 90 individuals, and genome-wide datasets from three individuals. They were able to use the data gathered to test previous hypotheses drawn from archaeological and historical data, and from studies of modern DNA.

“Nuclear DNA represents the full human genome and therefore contains much more information as mitochondrial DNA that covers only a small part of the human genome and represents only the maternal ancestry,” author Verena Schuenemann, group leader at the University of Tübingen told WIRED.

“Especially for admixture and ancestry analysis, it is important to look at as many informative/variable positions in the genome as possible to obtain a complete picture.”

The analysis found that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations in the Levant, and were also closely related to Neolithic populations from the Anatolian Peninsula and Europe.

“The genetics of the Abusir el-Meleq community did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300 year timespan we studied, suggesting that the population remained genetically relatively unaffected by foreign conquest and rule,” says Wolfgang Haak, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.

The data also demonstrates that modern Egyptians share approximately 8% more ancestry on the nuclear level with Sub-Saharan African populations than with ancient Egyptians.

“This suggests that an increase in Sub-Saharan African gene flow into Egypt occurred within the last 1,500 years,” explains Stephan Schiffels, group leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena.

The detailed findings of the study have been published in Nature Communications.