And their descendants carried the genetic signature of that movement for generations, until one of them was buried in a jar in Nuwayrat, and his tooth was excavated, and his genome was eventually read by scientists in Liverpool and London.

The Pre-Dynastic Background: How Egyptian Civilization Formed

Understanding NUE001 requires some understanding of where Egyptian civilization came from — because the 80 percent North African Neolithic ancestry in his genome is not the ancestry of some distant and unrelated past.

It is the ancestry of the people who directly built the civilization he inhabited.

Egypt’s pre-Dynastic period — the five or six millennia before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE — is one of the most archaeologically rich periods in African prehistory.

The archaeological cultures of the Nile Valley in this period show a gradual process of social, economic, and political elaboration that eventually culminated in the state.