NUE001 lived somewhere in the early part of that story.

He was not a pharaoh, not a royal official, not a person whose tomb would be carved with elaborate inscriptions or painted with scenes from the Book of the Dead.

His burial was modest by the standards of the elite.

But that modesty is itself significant: his genome represents not the exceptional few at the apex of Egyptian society, but something closer to an ordinary Egyptian of the period — a person living the lives that most people in Old Kingdom Egypt actually lived.

The archaeological context suggests he was of middling but not negligible status.