Click here for article in NYT concerning evidence of human habitation in North America much earlier than previously thought
click here for NYT article on mummy head The F.B.I. had never before worked on a specimen so old. If its scientists could extract genetic material from the 4,000-year-old mummy, they would add a powerful DNA collecting technique to their forensics arsenal and also unlock a new way of deciphering Egypt’s ancient past. What lies in Tomb 10AGovernor Djehutynakht and his wife, Lady Djehutynakht, are believed to have lived around 2000 B.C. during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. They ruled a province of Upper Egypt. Though the walls in their tomb were bare, the coffins were embellished with beautiful hieroglyphics of the afterlife. “His coffin is a classic masterpiece of Middle Kingdom art,” said Marleen De Meyer, assistant director for archaeology and Egyptology at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, who re-entered the tomb in 2009. “It has elements of a rare kind of realism.” Tooth raidersThe doctors and museum staff determined their best chance of retrieving DNA would be by extracting the mummy’s molar. “The core of the tooth was where the money was,” Dr. Chapman said. Teeth often act as tiny genetic time capsules. Researchers have used them to tell the tales of our prehistoric human cousins called Denisovans, as well as to provide insight into the medical history of long dead people. Unraveling the mummy’s genetic history
Dr. Loreille’s examination also showed that Governor Djehutynakht’s DNA carried clues to another mystery. For centuries archaeologists and historians have debated the origins of the ancient Egyptians and how closely related they were to modern people living in North Africa. To the researchers’ surprise, the governor’s mitochondrial DNA indicated his ancestry on his mother’s side, or haplogroup, was Eurasian. “No one will ever believe us,” Dr. Loreille recalled telling her colleague Jodi Irwin. “There’s a European haplogroup in an ancient mummy.” Dr. Irwin, the supervisory biologist at the F.B.I.’s DNA support unit, had similar concerns. To verify the results they sent a portion of the tooth to a Harvard lab, and then to the Department of Homeland Security, for further sequencing. Then last year as the F.B.I. scientists worked to confirm their results, another group affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany reported the first successful extraction of ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies. Their results showed that their ancient Egyptian samples were closer to modern Middle Eastern and European samples than to modern Egyptians, who have more sub-Saharan African ancestry. “It was at the same time ‘Dang! We’re not first,’” Dr. Loreille said. “But also we’re happy to see they had this Eurasian ancestry.” Alexander Peltzer, a population geneticist at the Planck Institute and an author on the first Egyptian mummy DNA paper, said Dr. Loreille’s genetic findings fit well with what his team had found. |