DNA of the Ancient Pharaohs

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Dr Rob describes the horrible levels of inbreeding within the ancient Egyptian royal family and how this affected them over time. This includes the problems we see in the mummies of King Tut and his father Akhenaten, plus further up the family tree in the time of Hatshepsut (who may have been the princess who drew Moses out of the Nile) and much later in time during the Ptolemies (Cleopatra only had three great-grandparents!).

Notes and links:

• Curse of the Pharaoh’s DNA
• DNA degradation (note, I don’t agree with everything said in this article)
• Y chromosome family tree (figure 2 in this article)
• Hatshepsut’s mummy and DNA
• Schuenemann et al. 2017 Ancient Egyptian mummy genomes suggest an increase of Sub-Saharan African ancestry in post-Roman periods
• The Faiyum
• Ancient History vs the Table of Nations (Biblical Genetics, May 5, 2020)
• Ptolemaic family tree
• Family tree of Hatshepsut, Tut, etc.
• Inbreeding among the Spanish Hapsburgs (Alvarez et al. 2009 The Role of Inbreeding in the Extinction of a European Royal Dynasty)
• Gad et al. 2021 Insights from ancient DNA analysis of Egyptian DNA