Through that door, future research will walk to ask questions about ancient Egyptian population history that could not even be properly framed before NUE001.

Those questions will include ones that the research team has already identified: expanding the sample to include more individuals from more sites and periods, developing the local Egyptian scientific infrastructure to conduct this research within Egypt, eventually attempting genomic analysis on mummified remains as methods continue to improve.

They will also include questions that no one has yet formulated — questions that only become visible once you can see something that was previously invisible.

The first ancient Egyptian genome has revealed the shape of what we don’t know, in the specific way that scientific advances always do: by answering one question and generating three more.