The 20 percent Fertile Crescent ancestry represents a real and significant contribution from the ancient Near East, but it does not displace or dilute the fundamentally North African character of NUE001’s genetic profile.

What the 20 percent Fertile Crescent ancestry does tell us is this: by the period of the Old Kingdom, at least some of the people living in Middle Egypt carried genetic ancestry that traced back to populations from the eastern Fertile Crescent.

This ancestry had been introduced through actual population movement — people with Fertile Crescent ancestry who had moved into Egypt and mixed with the existing population.

The mixing was old enough, and complete enough, that it appears as a consistent component of NUE001’s genome rather than as a recently admixed element.