The 4,500-Year-Old Egyptian Man Found In A Tomb — And The DNA Test That Revealed His Unexpected Ancestry

Ancient Egypt was African.

This was true before the genomic evidence, and it remains true with the genomic evidence.

The Old Kingdom was built by people whose primary ancestry was North African, as NUE001’s genome confirms.

The pharaonic civilization — its art, its religion, its administrative systems, its agricultural infrastructure, its monumental architecture — was developed by these people over thousands of years.

Ancient Egypt was also connected.

Its connections to the ancient Near East were not merely commercial or diplomatic but human — real people moved, over the course of generations, from the eastern Fertile Crescent into the Egyptian population, contributing a genetic heritage that persisted in individuals like NUE001.