Washington Post: Ancient Egyptians were European
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DrBanneker
Space is the Place
@KidStranglehold @MansaMusa
FYI, from the paper text, this describes the cemetery in Egypt these samples all came from. I am sure this is representative of all Egyptians
"Importantly, there is evidence for foreign influence at Abusir el-Meleq. Individuals with Greek, Latin and Hebrew names are known to have lived at the site and several coffins found at the cemetery used Greek portrait image and adapted Greek statue types to suit ‘Egyptian’ burial practices. The site’s first excavator, Otto Rubensohn, also found a Greek grave inscription in stone as well as a writing board inscribed in Greek46. Taken together with the multitude of Greek papyri that were written at the site, this evidence strongly suggests that at least some inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq were literate in, and able to speak, Greek"
Even into the Ptolemaic period, most Egyptians who were literate used hieroglyphs (and later demotic script)...having Greek and Hebrew names?
FYI, from the paper text, this describes the cemetery in Egypt these samples all came from. I am sure this is representative of all Egyptians
"Importantly, there is evidence for foreign influence at Abusir el-Meleq. Individuals with Greek, Latin and Hebrew names are known to have lived at the site and several coffins found at the cemetery used Greek portrait image and adapted Greek statue types to suit ‘Egyptian’ burial practices. The site’s first excavator, Otto Rubensohn, also found a Greek grave inscription in stone as well as a writing board inscribed in Greek46. Taken together with the multitude of Greek papyri that were written at the site, this evidence strongly suggests that at least some inhabitants of Abusir el-Meleq were literate in, and able to speak, Greek"
Even into the Ptolemaic period, most Egyptians who were literate used hieroglyphs (and later demotic script)...having Greek and Hebrew names?
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
Also, using Yoruba to measure sub-Saharan (I know) African admixture is used for comparison of overall African ancestry but I will grant in fairness they did do a plot of Egyptian versus other groups including Ethiopians, Somalis, etc. I still think the bigger issue is sample bias particularly given the dates and nature of the site.
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
Also, if the people of the Levant and the Egyptians were basically the same, why did Egyptians depict the peoples of the Levant differently from themselves (and don't say artistic license or some other bullshyt)
Egyptian dudes are in the upper right; everyone else is from the Levant (from 19th century BC)
Egyptian dudes are in the upper right; everyone else is from the Levant (from 19th century BC)
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
Last few things: regarding being related to Whites: "We find that ancient Egyptians are most closely related to Neolithic and Bronze Age samples in the Levant, as well as to Neolithic Anatolian and European populations (Fig. 5a,b)."
Neolithic European populations have not yet been unambiguously determined to be "White" the invasions by the current Europeans (Dorians, Ayrans, etc.) happened in the early Bronze Age. Neolithic Europeans aren't modern day Whites.
Finally the comment on the African mixture increasing over time is demonstrated in the graph below with the red being the "Sub-Saharan" component. This is shown as demonstration the invasions didn't really change demographics. One interesting detail though: this uses mitochrondrial DNA which is always inherited through the mother, not father.
Y-chromosome haplotypes, which show father contributions, were only obtained from three mummies because the genetic damage to the nucleus was pretty bad. Two of these they report with Middle Eastern haplotypes, 1 with North African---none European. I don't even know why European appears in the this article in WaPo. Even the authors are arguing Near East more than Europe.
Neolithic European populations have not yet been unambiguously determined to be "White" the invasions by the current Europeans (Dorians, Ayrans, etc.) happened in the early Bronze Age. Neolithic Europeans aren't modern day Whites.
Finally the comment on the African mixture increasing over time is demonstrated in the graph below with the red being the "Sub-Saharan" component. This is shown as demonstration the invasions didn't really change demographics. One interesting detail though: this uses mitochrondrial DNA which is always inherited through the mother, not father.
Y-chromosome haplotypes, which show father contributions, were only obtained from three mummies because the genetic damage to the nucleus was pretty bad. Two of these they report with Middle Eastern haplotypes, 1 with North African---none European. I don't even know why European appears in the this article in WaPo. Even the authors are arguing Near East more than Europe.
This article is still inconclusive as some scholars make a distinction between the DNA of the ruling families and the average ancient Egyptian who did not practice the incest the royals partook in to preserve royal blood.
Not well versed in genetics and still trying to figure out the difference in autosomal and STR analysis and what these German researchers conducted but at least in the case of the royal families, they were of sub-saharan African strains according to DNA Tribes (these articles have been posted on here before).
Rameses III: http://www.dnatribes.com/dnatribes-digest-2013-02-01.pdf
Amarna/Thutmosid Family: http://www.dnatribes.com/dnatribes-digest-2012-01-01.pdf
The Thutmosids were arguably the wealthiest and most powerful Egyptian dynasty.
Not well versed in genetics and still trying to figure out the difference in autosomal and STR analysis and what these German researchers conducted but at least in the case of the royal families, they were of sub-saharan African strains according to DNA Tribes (these articles have been posted on here before).
Rameses III: http://www.dnatribes.com/dnatribes-digest-2013-02-01.pdf
Amarna/Thutmosid Family: http://www.dnatribes.com/dnatribes-digest-2012-01-01.pdf
The Thutmosids were arguably the wealthiest and most powerful Egyptian dynasty.
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
There are a lot of good genetics books but genetic anthropology is a niche I learned from both journal literature and trying out techniques with data available. I can try to dig some references up. Be careful of the blogs out there since there is a lot of know-it-alls and disinformation about human genetics--even in reputable magazines like Scientific American.
For your questions: we have 23 pairs of chromosomes (46 total) 22 pairs are 'autosomal' or non-sex chromosomes that both sexes have. The last pair are the sex chromosomes (XX for girls, XY for boys). In addition, there is DNA in the mitochondria. Mitochondria are small organs in every cell that essentially produce energy for the cell (and us). They have DNA since they are descended from bacteria that eons ago formed associations with the cells of higher level organisms.
For the sex chromosome pair, the sex is always determined by the dad's sperm for the X for girl or Y for guy comes from dad. Because of this, the Y chromosome in male sex chromosomes is a continuing record of paternal ancestry. Likewise, the mitochondria and their DNA are pass from the mother in the egg so the mitochondrial (or mtDNA) is a record of maternal genetic ancestry.
The primary data in this paper is from the mtDNA since this is better preserved over time. They had 160 or so individuals they got mtDNA from and that is how they derived their primary results. Only 3 mummies had suitable sex chromosome (Y chromosomes) to study. So pretty much all their conclusion is based on mitochondrial DNA which records maternal ancestry.
Different ethnic groups of different geographic origins have mutations that don't appear as frequently or at all in other ethnic groups. These usually don't make us hugely different but can be used as markers which is how they try to partition ancestry.
One of my issues with the paper is they say the invasions of Persians, Greeks, Romans, etc. didn't change the ancestry recorded by mtDNA much. No kidding, since mtDNA is from mothers. 90% of the people from invaders are men so that wouldn't show up anyway unless you have extensive Y chromosome data which they don't.
MalikX
Superstar
I decided to re-read the study again.
Only 3 out of 90 mummies had their nuclear dna. Only 3
They cherry picked 90 mummies from the later periods of Egypt (from 1000 B.C. to 300 A.D. IIRC). Egypt was founded back in 3500 B.C. mind you, so that's 2500 years they're leaving out. They cherry picked mummies from the Northern half of the country which was closer to the Levant. (For those who aren't familiar with Egypt, it started out as two distinct kingdoms: Northern-Lower and Southern-Upper. United into one. Generally, the North was more mixed. The South filled with Nubians/Blacks). They wouldn't say how many mummies were from each period, meaning they could have chosen a bunch from the Ptolomaic, Persian and Roman periods. And of the 90 mummies, only 3 had both their maternal and paternal genetic material intact. Just three. The other 87 had only their mitochondrial (maternal dna), which they found in their teeth, leaving out half of their genetic sequence.
Only 3 out of 90 mummies had their nuclear dna. Only 3
They cherry picked 90 mummies from the later periods of Egypt (from 1000 B.C. to 300 A.D. IIRC). Egypt was founded back in 3500 B.C. mind you, so that's 2500 years they're leaving out. They cherry picked mummies from the Northern half of the country which was closer to the Levant. (For those who aren't familiar with Egypt, it started out as two distinct kingdoms: Northern-Lower and Southern-Upper. United into one. Generally, the North was more mixed. The South filled with Nubians/Blacks). They wouldn't say how many mummies were from each period, meaning they could have chosen a bunch from the Ptolomaic, Persian and Roman periods. And of the 90 mummies, only 3 had both their maternal and paternal genetic material intact. Just three. The other 87 had only their mitochondrial (maternal dna), which they found in their teeth, leaving out half of their genetic sequence.
I decided to re-read the study again.
Only 3 out of 90 mummies had their nuclear dna. Only 3
They cherry picked 90 mummies from the later periods of Egypt (from 1000 B.C. to 300 A.D. IIRC). Egypt was founded back in 3500 B.C. mind you, so that's 2500 years they're leaving out. They cherry picked mummies from the Northern half of the country which was closer to the Levant. (For those who aren't familiar with Egypt, it started out as two distinct kingdoms: Northern-Lower and Southern-Upper. United into one. Generally, the North was more mixed. The South filled with Nubians/Blacks). They wouldn't say how many mummies were from each period, meaning they could have chosen a bunch from the Ptolomaic, Persian and Roman periods. And of the 90 mummies, only 3 had both their maternal and paternal genetic material intact. Just three. The other 87 had only their mitochondrial (maternal dna), which they found in their teeth, leaving out half of their genetic sequence.
in other words, cacs gone cac.
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Grand Conde
Superstar
I see everyone just read the race-baiting 
thread title and ignored the actual article. 
thread title and ignored the actual article. 
Not everyone who's black is from the same place. Everybody who is white...I think is from the same place. They migrated like all people, but I don't think they changed that much only interbred with various groups of blacks.
And no I don't believe ancient Egyptians were European. Hell I don't even think whites are European. I think they just took the land when they came from the caves. I mean look at Eskimos.. They have dark hair and skin and live in the arctic. Even penguins live in the arctic and have black fur. No white people are from somewhere else.
And no I don't believe ancient Egyptians were European. Hell I don't even think whites are European. I think they just took the land when they came from the caves. I mean look at Eskimos.. They have dark hair and skin and live in the arctic. Even penguins live in the arctic and have black fur. No white people are from somewhere else.
Cacs doing their usual trickeryI decided to re-read the study again.
Only 3 out of 90 mummies had their nuclear dna. Only 3
They cherry picked 90 mummies from the later periods of Egypt (from 1000 B.C. to 300 A.D. IIRC). Egypt was founded back in 3500 B.C. mind you, so that's 2500 years they're leaving out. They cherry picked mummies from the Northern half of the country which was closer to the Levant. (For those who aren't familiar with Egypt, it started out as two distinct kingdoms: Northern-Lower and Southern-Upper. United into one. Generally, the North was more mixed. The South filled with Nubians/Blacks). They wouldn't say how many mummies were from each period, meaning they could have chosen a bunch from the Ptolomaic, Persian and Roman periods. And of the 90 mummies, only 3 had both their maternal and paternal genetic material intact. Just three. The other 87 had only their mitochondrial (maternal dna), which they found in their teeth, leaving out half of their genetic sequence.
MalikX
Superstar
They are. I doubt anyone actually even read the article. When I read that, I was
Out of 150 mummies, only 3 had their full dna. These nikkas writing sensational headlines when 97% of these mummies only had their maternal dna. They chose a location 60 miles from Cairo, which is literally 3 hours from the Mediterranean Sea. These scientists aren't dumb. They know full and well that Northern Egypt had more mixed people being so close to the Levant/Arab Peninsula. Southern Egypt had more native Egyptians/Nubians. They KNOW this. They also wouldn't say how many bodies were from which period, which is very strange. Again, they aren't stupid. From 1300 B.C. to 400 A.D., the Romans, Greeks, Assyrians and the Persians came. For all we know the majority of these bodies could be from the Roman era and they're trying to pretend like they're all from 1200 B.C.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017...mies-didn-t-have-any-dna-left-they-were-wrong
Ancient Egyptian mummies preserve many details of the deceased: facial features, signs of illness, even tattoos. But not, it seemed, DNA. After trying repeatedly to extract it, many scientists were convinced that the hot desert climate and, perhaps, the chemicals used in mummification destroyed any genetic material long ago. Now, a team of ancient DNA specialists has successfully sequenced genomes from 90 ancient Egyptian mummies. The game-changing results give scientists their first insight into the genetics of ordinary ancient Egyptians—which changed surprisingly little through centuries of conquests.
The sequencing success, reported this week in Nature Communications, “finally proves to everyone that there’s DNA preserved in ancient Egyptian mummies,” says Albert Zink, a biological anthropologist at the Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. He participated in a 2010 study that identified DNA sequences from 16 ancient Egyptian royal mummies, including Tutankhamun. But that study used polymerase chain reaction, a method that efficiently finds and extracts targeted DNA fragments but cannot always reliably distinguish between ancient DNA and modern contamination.
The new study, led by Johannes Krause, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, used next-generation sequencing methods to read stretches of any DNA present in a sample and fish out those that resembled human DNA. The complete reads allowed the team to spot tell-tale damage patterns associated only with ancient DNA. That makes the new analysis much more reliable, says Hannes Schroeder, an ancient DNA researcher at the University of Copenhagen. “It succeeds where previous studies on Egyptian mummies have failed or fallen short.”
Krause, who has studied the DNA of Neandertals, Denisovans, and prehistoric migrants to Europe, recently gravitated toward ancient Egyptian mummies because of the empire’s tumultuous political history. At various points, it was conquered by Assyrians from the Near East, Nubians from farther south along the Nile, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, among others. “Our question was, did those foreign conquests have a genetic impact?” Krause says.
Krause turned to a collection of 151 mummy heads from the ancient settlement of Abusir el-Meleq, about 100 kilometers south of Cairo along the Nile. The settlement was devoted to Osiris, the god of the dead, making it a popular burial spot for many centuries. The heads were excavated (and removed from their bodies) in the early 20th century and now reside in two collections in Germany, at the University of Tübingen and Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History. Radiocarbon dating shows that the mummies span 1300 years of ancient Egyptian history, during many of the foreign conquests and then Egypt’s incorporation into first the Greek and then the Roman empires.
Whereas the mummies’ soft tissue contained almost no DNA, the bones and teeth were chock full of genetic material. Ninety of the mummies yielded DNA once housed in mitochondria, the power plants of cells. Mitochondria carry only a few genes, but they are so plentiful that it’s often easier to find their DNA than the single full human genome in a cell’s nucleus. Still, because mitochondrial DNA is passed down from mother to child, it leaves out the story of the father’s DNA. The nuclear genome, which contains DNA from both parents, is far more informative. Unfortunately, Krause says, only a few of the mummies’ nuclear genomes were well preserved, and even fewer passed his strict contamination tests. His team ended up with nuclear genome samples from only three mummies, each from a different time period.
Krause’s team compared the mummies’ mitochondrial and nuclear DNA to ancient and modern populations in the Near East and Africa. They discovered that ancient Egyptians closely resembled ancient and modern Near Eastern populations, especially those in the Levant. What’s more, the genetics of the mummies remained remarkably consistent even as different powers conquered the empire. It’s possible that the mitochondrial genomes simply don’t record the genetic contributions of foreign fathers, says Yehia Gad, a molecular geneticist at the National Research Centre in Cairo and a founder of the Egyptian Museum’s ancient DNA lab who worked with Zink on past mummy studies. But the three mummies with nuclear genome data also show striking genetic continuity, Krause points out.
Later, however, something did alter the genomes of Egyptians. Although the mummies contain almost no DNA from sub-Saharan Africa, some 15% to 20% of modern Egyptians’ mitochondrial DNA reflects sub-Saharan ancestry. “It’s really unexpected that we see this very late shift,” Krause says. He suspects increased trade along the Nile—including the slave trade—or the spread of Islam in the Middle Ages may have intensified contact between Northern and sub-Saharan Africa.
Geneticist Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who studies how and when ancient populations mixed, calls the new results “a big accomplishment.” But he wonders how representative Abusir el-Meleq is of ancient Egypt as a whole. “Egypt is a big place,” he says. Other regions may have experienced its conquests in different ways, some perhaps with more genetic mixing. But Lazaridis hopes for more revelations to come. “Now that it’s been proven that it’s possible to sample from mummies—well, there are literally thousands of mummies.”
DrBanneker
Space is the Place
There is new research, covered in the NY Times about genes behind skin pigmentation. It turns out all genes for skin pigmentation are present in African populations--including the ones that make White and Asian people light skinned. Most of these genes originated in Africa and some of the same light skinned genes are in San (Bushmen) as well as Europeans/Near Easterners. The only exception that came from out of Africa was the SLC24A5 locus which was re-introduced to East Africa from the Near East several thousand years ago.
Relevant to this thread, in the mummy paper the authors made a deal about one or two of the mummies having the SLC24A5 locus which contributes to lighter skin pigmentation. This lead people to say they are not African but European or Near Eastern. In the new Science study however:
So that gene's presence doesn't mean the mummies were necessarily light skinned. Though the gene clustering was closer to the Near East it is still an open question of how their ancestry was constructed. Egyptologists, even Black ones, have long known the Delta was more Near Eastern while Upper Egypt more African. Oh well
Relevant to this thread, in the mummy paper the authors made a deal about one or two of the mummies having the SLC24A5 locus which contributes to lighter skin pigmentation. This lead people to say they are not African but European or Near Eastern. In the new Science study however:
So that gene's presence doesn't mean the mummies were necessarily light skinned. Though the gene clustering was closer to the Near East it is still an open question of how their ancestry was constructed. Egyptologists, even Black ones, have long known the Delta was more Near Eastern while Upper Egypt more African. Oh well
So they Gon start applying this to research on Egypt?There is new research, covered in the NY Times about genes behind skin pigmentation. It turns out all genes for skin pigmentation are present in African populations--including the ones that make White and Asian people light skinned. Most of these genes originated in Africa and some of the same light skinned genes are in San (Bushmen) as well as Europeans/Near Easterners. The only exception that came from out of Africa was the SLC24A5 locus which was re-introduced to East Africa from the Near East several thousand years ago.
Relevant to this thread, in the mummy paper the authors made a deal about one or two of the mummies having the SLC24A5 locus which contributes to lighter skin pigmentation. This lead people to say they are not African but European or Near Eastern. In the new Science study however:
So that gene's presence doesn't mean the mummies were necessarily light skinned. Though the gene clustering was closer to the Near East it is still an open question of how their ancestry was constructed. Egyptologists, even Black ones, have long known the Delta was more Near Eastern while Upper Egypt more African. Oh well
I thought the "all skin colors of man came from Africa" was known.
Guess not