Egyptologists and archaeologists of the ancient Near East have known for generations that the ancient world was connected in ways that geography alone does not predict.

The Amarna letters — the diplomatic correspondence of fourteenth century BCE Egypt — show a pharaoh in routine communication with the kings of Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, the Hittites, and the city-states of the Levant, addressing them in the Akkadian language (the diplomatic lingua franca of the Bronze Age Near East) and exchanging gifts, marriages, and trade.

This was a connected world.

What the genomic evidence from NUE001 adds is evidence for connection at an earlier period — not the fourteenth century BCE diplomatic connections documented in the Amarna letters, but the third millennium BCE connections of the Old Kingdom, when the pharaonic state was still relatively young.

And it documents connection not just at the level of elite exchange — the gold and lapis lazuli that flowed between royal courts — but at the genetic level, where ordinary people carried the traces of human movement in their DNA.