Abstract
The curse of ancient Egyptian DNA was lifted by a recent study which sequenced the mitochondrial genomes (mtGenome) of 90 ancient Egyptians from the archaeological site of Abusir el-Meleq. Surprisingly, these ancient inhabitants were more closely related to those from the Near East than to contemporary Egyptians. It has been accepted that the timeless highway of the Nile River seeded Egypt with African genetic influence, well before pre-Dynastic times. Here we report on the successful recovery and analysis of the complete mtGenome from a burial recovered from a remote Romano–Christian cemetery, Kellis 2 (K2). K2 serviced the ancient municipality of Kellis, a village located in the Dakhleh Oasis in the southwest desert in Egypt. The data were obtained by high throughput sequencing (HTS) performed independently at two ancient DNA facilities (Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, Dover, DE, USA and Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA). These efforts produced concordant haplotypes representing a U1a1a haplogroup lineage. This result indicates that Near Eastern maternal influence previously identified at Abusir el-Meleq was also present further south, in ancient Kellis during the Romano–Christian period.
Highlights
The Dakhleh Oasis is found in Egypt0 s Western Desert (Figure 1)
The cleaned bone was powdered in a sterilized stainless steel Waring MC2 blender cup, and the resultant bone powder was divided between Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) and the Department of Anthropology laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne (UIUC)
The two AFDIL extracts were treated with a mixture of Uracil DNA glycosylase (UDG) and Endonuclease VIII to remove uracil bases originating from the deamination of cytosine bases
Summary
The Dakhleh Oasis is found in Egypt0 s Western Desert (Figure 1). Located approximately 800 km southwest of Cairo, it has been occupied continuously since Paleolithic times and throughout Pharaonic times [1]. Since Old Kingdom times, humans have pursued an agrarian lifestyle and derived their water sources mostly from artesian wells, which tapped into the large aquifer under the desert [2,3]. Since the late 1970s, the interdisciplinary Dakhleh Oasis Project has been studying human biocultural. Genes 2017, 8, 262 biocultural adaptations over time in this oasis. The bioarchaeology component of the project has adaptations in thisassociated oasis.
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