They reconstructed the faces of 3 Egyptian mummies using DNA 2000 years ago

The The faces of three mummies identical to ancient Egypt They were reconstructed by a group of scientists in a laboratory in the United States, and they also found that they belonged to a community that was on the banks of the Nile, after analyzing their DNA sequences more than 2,000 years ago.

To the authors of the study, presented this month parabon nanolabs in florida, It is the first time that advanced techniques have been used to predict observable traits and phenotypes from very ancient human DNA.

as revealed Country, the three mummies correspond to men about 25 years old, with colored skin Light brown, while his eyes and hair were dark and freckled.

Current technological advances can reach such a level that it is even considered that they were Jews, and they may be of ancestry from Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia.

“We were all surprised and amazed to see that the DNA was no longer similar to the DNA of modern Egyptians (…) And that, of the three faces, only one looked Egyptian, and the others were southern European to me, and this is in fact what we also see in the lineage: that these people were, hereditary, More similar to the peoples of the Mediterranean of the people who are currently in Egypt Elaine McCray, Director of Bioinformatics at Parabon NanoLabs.

Researchers Code numbers assigned to each of the mummiesWhereas JK2134, the oldest, was found to have been alive between the years 776 and 569 BC, while JK2911 is from the year 769 and 560 from the same time, and JK2888 could have been around the years 97 and 2.

DNA helped preserve it The origin of the three mummies was from an archaeological site located next to the Nile River called Abu Sir al-Malaq. It is located in central Egypt and has been inhabited since at least then 3250 BC Until about 700 years from the same era, Spanish media reported.

“If you genetically compare these individuals to the modern population, their DNA was more Similar to individuals from Yemen, Tunisia and Morocco“It is not so much for the people who live in Egypt today,” the researcher said.

He also added that “sThey may have come from other parts of the Mediterranean, and they do not show any African ancestry, while the modern Egyptians do.”

The same specialist assures that, just as it was possible to reveal data through DNA 2000 years ago, it is also possible to perform an analysis using an analysis 50 years ago.

The European Nucleotide Archive, through its open data, also helped form the foundation on which the company has produced more than thousands of individuals with their DNA. Facial features are identified using predictive models when the samples are from people they don’t know.

Analysis has become the search for pieces of the puzzle, primarily because of DNA He was severely affected by the exposure to which he was exposed for years with the environment. El País emphasizes that even when cleaning up bacteria, a lot of data has been lost.

Using the assumption of low coverage, the specialists were able to work out what data to collect on the mummies statistically.

“With the data coming to us, we were unable to perform this analysis (…) This really shows how powerful these techniques are for challenging samples, the expert said.