The paper’s finding that the eastern Fertile Crescent component is specifically significant — rather than a more westerly Levantine component — suggests that the people who brought this ancestry to Egypt came from or through the deep east, possibly through trade networks that connected Egypt to Mesopotamia through the Levant as an intermediary.

Or it may reflect the specific demographic history of the populations that inhabited the Levantine corridor during the third millennium BCE — populations that themselves had mixed ancestry from the Levant and further east.

The analysis also found that alternative three-source models including a smaller direct Chalcolithic Levantine component were statistically consistent with the data, suggesting that multiple pathways of ancestry introduction may have contributed.

Distinguishing between these pathways with a single genome is not fully possible, and future research with additional ancient genomes will be needed to refine the picture.