The ancient DNA picture of Old Kingdom Egypt, built so far from a single genome, is consistent with what we know from archaeology and history.

A civilization rooted in African North African ancestry, mixed with Near Eastern populations who had been moving into the region for millennia, creating a population that was unmistakably Egyptian in its cultural expression even as it preserved genetic traces of the wider human world.

One person’s DNA is a narrow window into that history.

But it is a window that was previously completely closed.

NUE001 opened it.