Portraits based on ancient DNA
Scientists have recreated the faces of ancient Egyptian mummies more than 2000 years old
Maria Azarova, Naked Science
Modern technologies and DNA taken from mummified remains have helped to obtain highly detailed 3D images of the faces of three Egyptians who lived more than 2,000 years ago in an ancient community near the Nile.
Researchers from the American company Parabon NanoLabs recreated the faces of three ancient Egyptian mummies. This was done with the help of DNA, which was sequenced and studied a few years ago by archaeologists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, according to a press release. The results of the work were presented at the 32nd International Symposium on Human Identification, held in mid-September in Orlando.
The mummies were found in the village of Abusir el-Melek, located 11 kilometers from Cairo. To the west is the necropolis, which was used from the pre-Dynastic to the early Byzantine period. During excavations at the end of the XIX century, archaeologists found temples there, erected in honor of the sun god.
As the 3D reconstruction showed, the mummies belong to three 25-year-old men: sample JK2134 was dated 776-569 BC, JK2888 – 97-22 BC, JK2911 – 769-560 BC. That is, they died from 2023 to 2797 years ago. The models were created by forensic DNA phenotyping: genetic analysis helped to understand what the appearance of the deceased was.
According to the researchers, the young people did not resemble the current population of Egypt. "Our results are consistent with the conclusions of German scientists that the ancient Egyptians had more connections with the inhabitants of the Middle East and Europeans than with modern Egyptians," added Parabon NanoLabs.
Often, work with ancient deoxyribonucleic acid is complicated by the fact that the fragments are heavily degraded due to time and mixed with bacterial DNA. "Because of these two factors, the amount of human DNA available for sequencing can be extremely small," Ellen Greytak, director of bioinformatics at Parabon, said in a comment for the Live Science portal. But since the vast majority of DNA is common to humans, to recreate a person's appearance, the entire genome is not required. It is only necessary to study the differences in the DNA sequence in the size of one nucleotide, although sometimes it is necessary to analyze the polymorphism of a single nucleotide on the basis of a neighboring one.
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