A Man From Nuwayrat, Egypt, Gave the First Ancient Egyptian Genome, 20% Mesopotamia-Related Ancestry

A 2025 study in Nature reported the first whole genome from an ancient Egyptian. The man, known as NUE001, came from Nuwayrat in Egypt and was radiocarbon dated to 2855 to 2570 BCE, between the Early Dynastic period and the Fourth Dynasty. Adeline Morez Jacobs led the study, with Pontus Skoglund and Linus Girdland-Flink as senior authors. It appeared in Nature volume 644, issue 8077, pages 714 to 721, on 2 July 2025.

The ancestry split

About 77.6 percent of his ancestry, with an uncertainty of 3.8 points, matched Neolithic North African genomes from Skhirat-Rouazi in Morocco. About 22.4 percent, again with an uncertainty of 3.8 points, was most closely related to Neolithic Mesopotamian genomes. The authors describe this as direct evidence of genetic ancestry related to the eastern Fertile Crescent in ancient Egypt. Rounded, that is roughly 80 percent North African and 20 percent Mesopotamia-related.

What it does and does not show

The Mesopotamian share is a statistical match to the closest available reference genomes. It does not mean the man came from Mesopotamia, and the references are proxies for populations that are not directly sampled. The result points to movement of people, and not only trade, between the eastern Fertile Crescent and Egypt before or during his lifetime. One person cannot show how common that ancestry was across Egypt, so the finding rests on a single man.

Sources: Morez Jacobs et al., Nature 644, 714 to 721 (2025); Nature news report, July 2025.