Egyptian mummies had British forefathers

DNA study shows ‘strong mingling’ between north Africans and Europeans when pyramids were built

ANCIENT Egyptians were more closely related to early Britons than modern Africans, a new study has shown.

New DNA analysis of mummies dating from approximately 1,400 BC to 400 AD found that, although modern Egyptians are genetically similar to sub-saharan African populations, their ancient ancestors were more similar to their contemporary Europeans.

It suggests there was strong mingling between populations in Europe and north Africa at the time when the pyramids were being built.

“Central Europeans and Britons seem equally closely related to ancient Egyptians,” said senior author Dr Johannes Krause, of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

“In fact ancient Egyptians are on average even closer related to early Europeans than to modern Egyptians.” It is the first time that scientists have managed to extract useful DNA from mummies, which is usually destroyed by the humid air inside tombs.

“The potential preservation of DNA has to be regarded with scepticism,” said Dr Krause. “The hot Egyptian climate, the high humidity levels in many tombs and some of the chemicals used in mummification techniques, contribute to DNA degradation and are thought to make the long-term survival of DNA in Egyptian mummies unlikely.”

The team sampled 151 mummies from the archaeological site of Abusir el-meleq, along the Nile in Middle Egypt and were able to recover partial DNA from 90 individuals, and genomewide datasets from three individuals.

It showed that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to ancient populations in the Levant (modern day Syria, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon), but also to Neolithic farming populations from the Anatolian Peninsula around Turkey and Europe, and even Britain.

The team wanted to determine if ancient populations were affected by the conquests of Alexander the Great and other foreign powers. Wolfgang Haack, group leader at the Max Planck Institute, said: “The genetics of the Abusir el-meleq community did not undergo any major shifts during the 1,300-year timespan we studied, suggesting that the population remained genetically relatively unaffected by foreign conquest and rule.”

The data shows that modern Egyptians share approximately eight per cent more ancestry on the nuclear level with Sub-saharan African populations than with ancient Egyptians.

However, the team said it was too early to tell how so much European DNA came to be present in Egyptian populations. “People from Egypt and the Near East might have been connected over thousands of years,” said Dr Krause. “I would therefore not call them migrants. We would need older data to show where the origin of the ancient Egyptians was.” The study was published in Nature Communications.

It comes after the history of human evolution had to be rewritten after scientists discovered two fossils of an apelike creature which had human-like teeth in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2million years ago.

The discovery proved our ancestors were already starting to evolve in Europe 200,000 years before the earliest African hominid.