The people who shared it with him are gone.

The specific community of Nuwayrat in his time is gone, rebuilt and rebuilt again over four millennia until the village that bears a version of that name today has no visible connection to the settlement of the Old Kingdom period.

But the tooth survived.

And the information in the tooth survived.

And now, for the first time, science can say something true about where this man came from — where his ancestors had been, what genetic connections reached across the ancient world to find their way into the DNA of a man buried in a hillside in Middle Egypt at the moment when one of humanity’s greatest civilizations was still young.

Ancient Egypt was part of a connected human world.