Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods

Abstract

Egypt, located on the isthmus of Africa, is an ideal region to study historical population dynamics due to its geographic location and documented interactions with ancient civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe. Particularly, in the first millennium BCE Egypt endured foreign domination leading to growing numbers of foreigners living within its borders possibly contributing genetically to the local population. Here we present 90 mitochondrial genomes as well as genome-wide data sets from three individuals obtained from Egyptian mummies. The samples recovered from Middle Egypt span around 1,300 years of ancient Egyptian history from the New Kingdom to the Roman Period. Our analyses reveal that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with Near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times. This analysis establishes ancient Egyptian mummies as a genetic source to study ancient human history and offers the perspective of deciphering Egypt's past at a genome-wide level.

Evaluation of DNA conservation in Nile-Saharan environment, Missiminia, in Nubia: Tracking maternal lineage of “X-Group”

“…By identifying the affiliation of the haplogroups and their comparison with the cumulative data from the literature ( Supplementary Table 1), we can discuss each haplogroup to verify hypotheses on the X-Group origins. We found an influx of sub-Saharan African ancestry after the Meroitic Period, which corroborates the findings of Schuenemann et al (2017) [50]. L1b and L2 haplogroups are mostly present in West Africa, respectively at 11.4% and 51.8% [51], and also present in North Africa [52][53][54][55].…”

Reconstructing Prehistoric African Population Structure

“…The best fitting model for the Somali includes Tanzania_Luxmanda_3100BP ancestry, Dinka-related ancestry, and 16% ± 3% Iranian Neolithic-related ancestry (P = 0.015). This suggests that ancestry related to the Iranian Neolithic appeared in eastern Africa after earlier gene flow related to Levant Neolithic populations, a scenario that is made more plausible by the genetic evidence of admixture of Iranian Neolithic-related ancestry throughout the Levant by the time of the Bronze Age (Lazaridis et al, 2016) and in ancient Egypt by the Iron Age (Schuenemann et al, 2017). …”

Ancient genomes from North Africa evidence prehistoric migrations to the Maghreb from both the Levant and Europe

“…Genetic data from present-day populations 11-13 suggests that North African ancestry has contributions from four main sources: 1) an autochthonous Maghrebi component related to a back migration to Africa ∼12,000 years ago from Eurasia; 2) a Middle Eastern component probably associated with the Arab conquest; 3) a sub-Saharan component derived from trans-Saharan migrations; and 4) a European component that has been linked to recent historic movements. Paleogenomic studies have begun to provide insights into North African Prehistory 14-16 ; however, no research to date has tested whether the Neolithic transition in the Maghreb was driven by local populations who adopted cultural and technological innovations or the migration of people. Here, we perform genome-wide analysis of remains from the Early Neolithic site of Ifri n’Amr or Moussa (IAM; ∼5,200 BCE, n=7) and the Late Neolithic site of Kelif el Boroud (KEB; ∼3,000 BCE; n=8) (Supplementary Note 1).…”