NUE001’s success suggests that the path to ancient Egyptian genomics may lie not through the most elaborate preserved bodies but through humbler remains — bones and teeth from ordinary burials, particularly those in well-sealed contexts that limited contamination and temperature fluctuation.

This is counterintuitive from the perspective of historical prestige: we most want to know about the pharaohs and the elite, but those are precisely the individuals whose remains may be the most difficult to analyze genetically.

David Reich of Harvard Medical School, one of the world’s leading ancient DNA researchers, who was not involved in the NUE001 study, described the result as “incredibly exciting and important” and noted that researchers had “always hoped we would get our first ancient DNA from mummies.” The fact that the breakthrough came from a tooth rather than from the famous mummified remains that have been studied for centuries is an important signal about where future research should look.

The Technical Achievement: How A Tooth Became A Genome