Adeline Morez Jacobs, the first author, completed her doctoral work at Liverpool John Moores University, working with Joel Irish, a physical anthropologist who has studied ancient African and Near Eastern skeletal populations for decades.

The combination of genetic expertise from the Crick Institute with the archaeological and physical anthropological expertise from Liverpool represented exactly the kind of disciplinary collaboration that the most successful ancient DNA projects require.

The involvement of an ancient DNA laboratory at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo — which Hisham Gad, whose work has contributed to Egyptian ancient DNA infrastructure, is associated with — represents an important dimension of the project’s significance beyond the immediate scientific findings.

Egyptian scientific institutions are developing the capacity to conduct this research on Egyptian material, within Egypt, in ways that earlier generations of ancient DNA research did not always facilitate.