Old Kingdom Egyptian aDNA

[Xareen]

Whole genome data from a town near Giza dated to when the pyramids were being built.

Read here: https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/18979/

Seems like it would make a decent proxy?

What really caught my eye was the 64 f***ing samples from Ghaba (South Upper Nubia) that we don't get much of any comment on. They all had some super exotic mtDNA which isnt uncommon for Nubia but I didn't expect even the Neolithic samples to be entirely non-L.

@Shimbiris @The alchemist

 

[New World]

What does this mean?

 

[Abdirazaq]

Hopefully this should be the debate ender as to “who the ancient Egyptians were”.

This is gonna be a long read.

 

[Shimbiris]

Wow, looks like this individual is about ~10% @Nilotic-like and that's without counting the ANA ancestry they probably have hidden within their MENA ADMIXTURE component:

At K=12 (Fig 4.3, S4.8-S4.10), the ADMIXTURE component analysis shows that NUE001 shares the same main ancestry as present-day populations from the Arabian Peninsula as well as BedouinB, which ultimately derived from Levantine Epipaleolithic Natufians (Fig 4.3, in yellow, Lazaridis et al., 2016), consistent with the PCA. NUE001 also carries ~10% ancestry similar to the one found in the 4,500-year-old Ethiopian genome, derived from the eastern sub-Saharan African component (Fig 4.3, in red).

You can see it clearly in their ADMIXTURE run:

They show Nilotic ancestry whereas the other ancient MENAs like the Levantines do not. The rest of their ancestry, to me, possibly seems mostly like Anatolian-Neolithic/Natufians and is probably pretty much just an ANA and Anatolian-HG mix like Natufians and would cluster I reckon somewhere around here:

Hopefully this should be the debate ender as to “who the ancient Egyptians were”.

This is gonna be a long read.

What this does, for now, is that the Ancient Egyptians from the early periods, if this sample is representative, were definitely part SSA. Part Nilotic and part "ANA". Yes, I consider ANA an SSA cluster as it clearly clusters as such and just has a Eurasian-pull because it's probably closely related to the Proto-Eurasians and may very well be descended from the early hold-overs who kept Y-DNA E in Africa.

In my opinion, this simulated ANA sample is showing the same sort of affinity the 40-50kya Ust-Ishim sample is in having a strange "SSA" pull. They're both representing very ancient affinities that are from a time when SSAs and Eurasians weren't as differentiated and developed in their drift as now:

E may have started out as early "Eurasian" but it clearly re-entered or stayed in Africa very early and now all of its upstream brothers are SSA, one being the clade of Mota, and the other being the clade of West-Africans while M35 seems to originate with ANAs, themselves an "SSA" group.

And from looking at modern Egyptians, Natufians, Horners and ancient Maghrebis like the IBM, it's clear Early AEs' Y-DNA will be mostly E-M35 which most likely comes from the IBM's ANA ancestry whereas their Anatolian-HG-related ancestry is represented by their Eurasian mtDNA meaning AE Y-DNA is overwhelmingly SSA as well but they will probably have mostly Eurasian mtDNA and of course a shit ton of Anatolian-HG ancestry like Neolithic Levantines and Natufians do.

I hope I can get this sample from the academic, get David to G25 it and see how much Iran-Chalcolithic it has. I suspect very little compared to the later Iron-Age Egyptians. This is probably a pre-Semitic admixture individual. If so, this will hopefully be a brilliant proxy for Horners' Natufian/IBM ancestry in G25. And the author's findings seem to track with that:

Nuerat sequenced to 0.22X coverage, dated to 2,868-2,492 cal BCE (95.4% probability) - consistent with the 3rd-4th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom. Allele frequency-based analyses (PCA, ADMIXTURE, f-statistics, qpAdm) show a strong genetic affinity of this sample to Levantine Natufians. Compared with genomes dated from the end of the Dynastic period (Third Intermediate Period) and present-day Egyptians, the Nuerat sample did not carry the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherer genetic component that started to spread across West Asia ~4,000 years ago and is widely spread in presentday populations. The presence of this component in Egypt is likely associated with admixture between local Egyptian populations and Bronze Age-related populations from West Asia. This admixture pattern might result from the dominance of Lower Egypt by Canaanite (Levantine) rulers during the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1,650-1,550 BCE).

@Xareen you are a BOQOR for this finding!

@Idilinaa