Sealed in a pottery vessel for over 4,500 years, the skeleton of an ancient Egyptian craftsman has now yielded the first complete genome from Egypt's Old Kingdom, offering a rare genetic window into the dawn of the Age of the Pyramids. The remains were found in 1902 inside a pottery vessel within a rock-cut tomb at Nuwayrat, roughly 165 miles south of Cairo. The man's DNA was exceptionally well-preserved, which researchers suspect is thanks to the unusual burial method, the Guardian reports.
Analysis of the bones suggests that the man, likely in his 60s and suffering from arthritis, spent long periods sitting on hard ground, pointing to possible work as a potter or similar craftsman. "It's interesting that the man was found in a pot. That in itself is odd," says Joel Irish, a professor of anthropology and archaeology at Liverpool John Moores University. "He was put in a relatively high-class tomb and not any old person ends up in a rock-cut tomb. Maybe he was a super-good potter and ended up in someone's favor."
DNA analysis found the man had dark skin, brown eyes, and brown hair, with ancestry mostly from North African Neolithic populations, and about 20% from the Fertile Crescent, which includes Mesopotamia and surrounding regions. "Although more genomes are needed to fully understand the genomic diversity of early Egyptians, our results indicate that contacts between Egypt and the eastern Fertile Crescent were not limited to objects and imagery (such as domesticated animals and plants, as well as writing systems) but also encompassed human migration," Irish and other researchers wrote in a study published in the journal Nature.
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