An international team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Tuebingen and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, successfully recovered and analyzed ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies dating from approximately 1400 BCE to 400 CE, including the first genome-wide nuclear data from three individuals, establishing ancient Egyptian mummies as a reliable source for genetic material to study the ancient past. The study, published today in Nature Communications, found that modern Egyptians share more ancestry with Sub-Saharan Africans than ancient Egyptians did, whereas ancient Egyptians were found to be most closely related to ancient people from the Near East.
Egypt is a promising location for the study of ancient populations. It has a rich and well-documented history, and its geographic location and many interactions with populations from surrounding areas, in Africa, Asia and Europe, make it a dynamic region. Read more.
This makes me sad. Not this itself, but my reaction to it.
When I was a child, I read Popular Science religiously (as well as a lot of other accessible-but-probably-not-great-quality sources on science). I treated snippets like this as dispatches from the front lines, and I mentally filed them all away with great care. Scientists were out there doing cool things, slowly progressing in that grand transnational quest to figure out the truth about shit. Maybe someday I would be doing that, but in the meantime, I better remember all the articles!
Several things have changed. I hope that I’ve become a little more discerning in my consumption of science in the popular press. At the very least, I’m good at redirecting all the one-weird-trick social psychology studies to /dev/null. I also no longer believe I’m going to have any impact on the aforementioned great quest for truth.
But that’s not what’s depressing. What’s depressing is that I too one look at this and thought “oh shit, i know exactly what crazy internet drama this is going to make for”.