First human genome from ancient Egypt sequenced from 4,800-year-old teeth

Forty years after the first effort to extract mummy DNA, researchers have finally generated a full genome sequence from an ancient Egyptian

The Ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom (2686–2125 bc) produced many lasting artefacts — but little DNA has survived.Credit: Azoor Photo/Alamy

Teeth from an elderly man who lived around the time that the earliest pyramids were built have yielded the first full human genome sequence from ancient Egypt.

The remains are 4800 to 4500 years old, overlapping with a period in Egyptian history known as the Old Kingdom or the Age of Pyramids. They harbour signs of ancestry similar to that of other ancient North Africans, as well as to people from the Middle East, researchers report today in Nature¹.

“It’s incredibly exciting and important,” says David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. “We always hoped we would get our first ancient DNA from mummies.”

Numerous labs have tried to extract DNA from ancient Egyptian remains. In 1985, evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo reported the first ancient DNA sequences from any human: several thousand DNA letters from a 2,400-year-old Egyptian mummy of a child². But Pääbo, who won a Nobel prize in 2022 for other work, later realized that the sequences were contaminated with modern DNA — possibly his own. A 2017 study generated limited genome data from three Egyptian mummies that lived between 3,600 and 2,000 years ago³.

The hot North African climate speeds up the breakdown of DNA, and the mummification process might also accelerate it, said Pontus Skoglund, a palaeogeneticist at the Francis Crick Institute who co-led the Nature study, at a press briefing. “Mummified individuals are probably not a great way to preserve DNA.”

The ceramic vessel in which the remains of the Nuwayrat individual were discovered.Credit: A. Morez *et al./Nature*

The remains that Skoglund’s team sequenced pre-date widespread mummification: the person was interred instead in a ceramic pot, a sign of high, but not elite, status. The remains were found at an archaeological site called Nuwayrat, 265 kilometres south of Cairo along the Nile river. The teeth and bones were discovered in 1902, when Egypt was under British colonial rule. They were donated to institutions in Liverpool, UK, where they have been ever since, even surviving German bombing during the Second World War.

Low expectations

Skoglund says his expectations were low when his team extracted DNA from several teeth from the Nuwayrat individual. But two samples contained enough authentic ancient DNA to generate a full genome sequence. Y-chromosome sequences indicated that the remains belonged to a male.