(CNN)
Ancient Egyptians and their modern counterparts share less in common than you might think. That is, at least genetically, a team of scientists have found.
Researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, both in Germany,
have decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians for the first time, with unexpected results.
Publishing its findings in Nature Communications,
the study concluded that preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.
Modern Egyptians, by comparison, share much more DNA with sub-Saharan populations.
The findings have turned years of theory on its head, causing Egyptologists to re-evaluate the region's history while unlocking new tools for scientists working in the field.
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"When you touch a bone, you probably leave more DNA on the bone than is inside (it)," he argued. "Contamination is a big issue. ...
Only in the last five or six years has it become possible to actually study DNA from ancient humans, because we can now show whether DNA is ancient or not by (its) chemical properties."
Heat and high humidity in tombs, paired with some of the chemicals involved in mummification, all contribute to DNA degradation, the paper adds, but it describes its findings as "the first reliable data set obtained from ancient Egyptians."
Analyzing samples spanning over a millennium, researchers looked for genetic differences compared with Egyptians today. They found that the sample set showed a strong connection with a cluster of ancient non-African populations based east of the Mediterranean Sea.
Krause describes the far-reaching data set gained from looking at mitochondrial genomes: "
This is not just the DNA of one person. It's the DNA of the parents, grandparents, grandparents' parents, grand-grand-grandparents' parents and so forth.
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So if we don't find sub-Saharan African ancestry in those people, that is pretty representative, at least for Middle Egypt."