Angela
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The major take away is that the similarity of ancient Egyptians to people from the Levant perhaps extended all the way to far southern desert like Egypt, although I wish there was an autosomal analysis.
See: J. Eldon Molto et al
Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequencing of a Burial from a Romano–Christian Cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: Preliminary Indications
http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/8/10/262
"Abstract: The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano–Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano–Christian period."
"AMS radiocarbon dating from 21 K2 burials indicates a calibrated range of 80–445 years AD [5]"
"A key molecular paleopathology result is the identification of co-infections with Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae in several male skeletons [8]. In general, both metric and non-metric trait analyses of a large sample of burials indicate a resident population slowly changing over time [1,9], but in contrast, the preliminary mtDNA analyses suggest maternal diversity as all 13 individuals examined to date had different mtDNA hyper variable region I profiles [6,7]. At the height of its occupation, Kellis likely had 2000–3000 inhabitants [10]."
"Over time Kellis was a diverse municipality with a combination of pagan, popular magic, and Manichean and Christian beliefs; however, when abandoned near the mid-4th century AD, it was Christian [11]. Kellis was also a sophisticated community attested by the recovery of multiple texts written in Manichaean, Greek, and Coptic [11,12]."
Ancestors of the Copts, perhaps?
See: J. Eldon Molto et al
Complete Mitochondrial Genome Sequencing of a Burial from a Romano–Christian Cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: Preliminary Indications
http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/8/10/262
"Abstract: The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano–Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano–Christian period."
"AMS radiocarbon dating from 21 K2 burials indicates a calibrated range of 80–445 years AD [5]"
"A key molecular paleopathology result is the identification of co-infections with Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium leprae in several male skeletons [8]. In general, both metric and non-metric trait analyses of a large sample of burials indicate a resident population slowly changing over time [1,9], but in contrast, the preliminary mtDNA analyses suggest maternal diversity as all 13 individuals examined to date had different mtDNA hyper variable region I profiles [6,7]. At the height of its occupation, Kellis likely had 2000–3000 inhabitants [10]."
"Over time Kellis was a diverse municipality with a combination of pagan, popular magic, and Manichean and Christian beliefs; however, when abandoned near the mid-4th century AD, it was Christian [11]. Kellis was also a sophisticated community attested by the recovery of multiple texts written in Manichaean, Greek, and Coptic [11,12]."
Ancestors of the Copts, perhaps?