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Egypt Independent
“Scientists have reconstructed the faces of three ancient Egyptian men using more than 2,000 years old DNA”, Newsweek, the American Magazine published.
It is believed that this is the first-time modern technologies are used, based on human DNA in this era. The three analysed samples date between 2,023 and 2,797 years old.
According to Newsweek, “the ancient Egyptian trio are JK2134, who dates back to 776-569 BC, JK2888 estimated to have lived between 97-2 BC and JK2911 who is believed to have lived around 769-560 BC”.
Parabon NanoLabs revealed the features of ancient Egyptian mummies. Scientists used advanced technology and forensic medicine to predict how the faces looked like approximately at 25 years old. It is believed that the skin colour of the three men was light brown with black hair.
“These results are highly consistent with Schuenemann et al’s conclusions that ancient Egyptians shared more ancestry with near Easterners than present-day Egyptians, who received additional sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times and that they had an allele for lighter skin”, Parabon NanoLabs said in a statement.
Preliminary data were obtained from the three ancient Egyptian mummies, available in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA). They were sequenced and matched to the human reference genome.
“Parabon has been the leader in forensic microarray analysis for years, and with the introduction of this new imputation technology, we can now handle even the most challenging samples, ancient or forensic”, said Dr. Janet Cady bio-informaticist and genome sequence (WGS) analyst.
