The molecular chains broke into shorter and shorter fragments, but fragments still readable by the right technology.

That technology arrived, finally, in the twenty-first century.

The researchers who applied it — working in cleanrooms in Liverpool and London, using sequencing machines and computational algorithms that would be incomprehensible to any inhabitant of the ancient world — recovered what the four and a half millennia had left behind.

The weight of that time is almost impossible to properly feel.

We can state it: four and a half thousand years.

We can perform the arithmetic: roughly 180 human generations, each one connecting to the next through birth and child-rearing and death, from the tomb at Nuwayrat to the laboratory at the Crick Institute.