But feeling the reality of that duration — actually holding in mind what it means for a tooth to have preserved readable molecular information across that span of time — is another matter.

What the genomics makes possible is not the elimination of that distance but its bridging.

The genome of NUE001 is not a time machine; it does not transport us to Old Kingdom Egypt, does not let us walk the streets of a provincial town in the age of the pyramid-builders.

But it establishes a molecular connection across the distance — a thread of biological information that reaches from the third millennium BCE to the twenty-first century CE and says something true, something real, about the person who left it behind.

Ancient Egypt was part of a connected human world.