NILE VALLEY - A DNA bone test on a man who lived 4,500 years ago in the Nile Valley has shed new light on the rise of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation.
An analysis of his skeleton shows he was 60 years old and possibly worked as a potter, but also that a fifth of his DNA came from ancestors living 1,500km away in the other great civilisation of the time, in Mesopotamia or modern day Iraq. It is the first biological evidence of links between the two and could help explain how Egypt was transformed from a disparate collection of farming communities to one of the mightiest civilisations on Earth.
The findings lend new weight to the view that writing and agriculture arose through the exchange of people and ideas between these two ancient worlds. The lead researcher, Prof Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told BBC News that being able to extract and read DNA from ancient bones could shed new light on events and individuals from the past, allowing black and white historical facts to burst into life with technicolour details. "If we get more DNA information and put it side by side with what we know from archaeological, cultural, and written information we have from the time, it will be very exciting," he said.
Our understanding of our past is drawn in part from written records, which is often an account by the rich and powerful, mostly about the rich and powerful. Biological methods are giving historians and scientists a new tool to view history through the eyes of ordinary people. The DNA was taken from a bone in the inner ear of remains of a man buried in Nuwayrat, a village 265km south of Cairo.
He died between 4,500 and 4,800 years ago, a transformational moment in the emergence of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Archaeological evidence indicated that the two regions may have been in contact at least 10,000 years ago when people in Mesopotamia began to farm and domesticate animals, leading to the emergence of an agricultural society. Many scholars believe this social and technological revolution may have influenced similar developments in ancient Egypt – but there has been no direct evidence of contact, until now. (BBC/ Liverpool John Moores University/Nature)
