In North Africa, this Near Eastern farmer ancestry largely replaced the older indigenous population over time, leaving only traces of the older ancestry in some modern North African communities.

NUE001’s 80 percent North African Neolithic ancestry reflects primarily this post-Neolithic, post-farming introduction of ancestry — the people who had been living in the Nile Valley for several thousand years before the Old Kingdom, the descendants of the early farmers who had brought agriculture to the region from the Fertile Crescent in the deep Neolithic past.

His 20 percent eastern Fertile Crescent ancestry represents an additional, more recent contribution from the same general direction — specifically from the eastern Fertile Crescent — that was introduced through the contacts of the Chalcolithic and Early Dynastic periods.

This layered ancestry picture — older North African Neolithic ancestry as the dominant component, with a more recent eastern Fertile Crescent contribution — is consistent with what ancient DNA research has found in other ancient populations of the region.