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

For NUE001, the contamination analysis was consistent with a genuine ancient signal.

The characteristic damage patterns — specifically, the accumulation of specific base changes at the ends of fragments, a signature of age-related deamination of cytosine bases — were present in the expected pattern.

The Y-chromosome analysis allowed estimation of the proportion of reads from male (NUE001’s own) DNA versus any female contamination.

The consistency of results across multiple independent analyses provided confidence that the genome was authentic.

The resulting sequenced genome was then compared against the panel of modern and ancient populations described in the previous section, using the population genetic methods that allowed the ancestry modeling.