A new article in Nature revealed that Carsten Pusch from the University of Tübingen managed to sequence the DNA of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Sadly the article doesn't give more information about the identity or age of the mummy, but there is a fleeting mention that the man belonged to haplogroup I2, an extremely rare lineage in modern Egypt. The combined studies on contemporary Egyptian Y-DNA give barely 0.5% of haplogroup I, and most of it is believed to be I* rather than I2.
From the article:
From the article:
Nature said:Now that Pusch and his colleagues have demonstrated next-generation sequencing in Egyptian mummies, however, moving on to entire genomes “isn’t rocket science”, Gilbert says. “What limits you is the size of a sample. For Denisova Man they had just a finger bone. Here they have the whole mummy.”
Indeed, Pusch and his colleagues say that they are now working on a more comprehensive analysis, and that “entire-genome sequencing of ancient Egyptian individuals is likely to become standard in the not-too-distant future”.