Technological advances have allowed us to learn more about the world we live in, not only the one that surrounds us at the moment but also the ancient past that we are not able to witness firsthand. This September, specialists from Parabon Nanolabs helped us recover a bit of our millenary past through the facial reconstruction of three young Egyptians who walked the earth more than 2,000 years ago.
DNA-based reconstruction
Team members, led by Dr. Janet Cady, Ph.D., were able to process the DNA samples at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Tübingen in Germany.
The painstaking process was made possible by advances in the field of bioinformatics. In the past, reconstructing genotypes from such old and tiny DNA samples was impossible or, at the very least, a complicated and inaccurate process. However, the new imputation method showed amazing results, and Dr. Cady assures that with this new technology it will be possible to tackle the most challenging samples, whether forensic or ancient.
Faces of the past
With the new process, the research team was able to determine the age of the samples, the pigmentation of these young men’s skin, the shape of their faces, their ancestry, and even their approximate age.
Thus, they determined that each mummy was about 25 years old, and all three inhabited the community of Abusir el-Melek, on the banks of the Nile, at different times. The first young man, named JK2134, lived between 776 and 569 BC, the second, called JK2888 between 97 and 2 BC, and finally, there is JK2911, who lived between the years 769 to 560 BC.
Interestingly, reconstruction of their features and ancestry also revealed that the mummies resembled the current inhabitants of the Mediterranean and the Middle East rather than Egyptians today.
An impossible task
This is not the first time that the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Tübingen have joined forces to investigate the Egyptian genome. Already in 2017, they conducted another research to study the ancestry of present-day Egyptians.
Back then, they wanted to “check whether the conquest of Alexander the Great and other foreign powers left a genetic imprint on the ancient Egyptian population,” as Verena Schuenemann, leader of that research, explained.
What they found was consistent with the new findings of Janet Cady’s study: the ancient Egyptians were more closely related genetically to the ancient populations of the Mediterranean Levant and the Neolithic populations of the Anatolian peninsula. On the other hand, present-day Egyptians are 8% more closely related to sub-Saharan African populations than to their ancestors in the region.
None of these studies would have been possible if previous skepticism about analyzing such old DNA evidence had not been overcome. The norm was that it was almost impossible to obtain reliable DNA samples due to the deterioration the remains suffered from the heat and humidity of Egypt, in addition to the chemicals used in mummification.
Fortunately, the scientists did not give up, and they insisted there must be a way to obtain good samples, and their perseverance bore fruit which we can see today with the reconstructed faces of our friends from 2,000 years ago. Little by little, the past is coming back to us so that we can witness it.
Images from: RT, Vix, Timis Local News
