That date marks the end of a forty-year effort to retrieve the first ancient Egyptian genome from the formative period of Egyptian civilization.

It also marks the beginning of what will surely be an extensive and consequential program of research.

The year 2025 was the right moment for several reasons that came together to make the success possible.

Sequencing technology had advanced to a point where the depth of coverage achievable from a degraded ancient sample was sufficient for population genetic analysis.

The computational tools for analyzing ancient genomic data — including the authentication methods, the population genetic models, and the databases of comparison genomes — had matured through years of application to other ancient populations.

The institutional infrastructure for ancient DNA research had grown to include multiple well-equipped laboratories capable of the stringent protocols the work requires.