It tells us that the genetic processes that shaped North African and Near Eastern populations during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods had already produced, by the Old Kingdom period, the mixed ancestry profile that we see in NUE001.

And it raises the question — which future research will need to address — of how that profile changed or persisted across the subsequent millennia of Egyptian history.

The Weight Of Four And A Half Millennia

There is something almost vertiginous about the timeline of the NUE001 discovery.

The man died.

His body was placed in a ceramic vessel.

The vessel was sealed in a rock-cut tomb in a hillside at Nuwayrat.

His community continued without him, farming the fields along the Nile, paying taxes to the nome administration, living out the ordinary rhythms of Old Kingdom life.