1 hour agoShareSaveThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtProf Joel Irish at Liverpool John Moores University conducted a detailed analysis of the skeleton to build up a picture of the man as an individual.”What I wanted to do was to find out who this guy was, let’s learn as much about him as possible, what his age was, his stature was, what he did for a living and to try and personalise the whole thing rather than treat him as a cold specimen,” he said.The bone structure indicated that the man was between 45 and 65 years old, though evidence of arthritis pointed to the upper end of the scale. He was just over 5ft 2in tall, which even then was short.Prof Irish was also able to establish he was probably a potter. The hook-shaped bone at the back of his skull was enlarged, indicating he looked down a lot. His seat bones are expanded in size, suggesting that he sat on hard surfaces for prolonged periods. His arms showed evidence of extensive movement back and forth, and there were markings on his arms where his muscles had grown, indicating that he was used to lifting heavy objects.”This shows he worked his tail off. He’s worked his entire life,” the American-born academic told BBC News.Dr Linus Girdland Flink explained that it was only because of a tremendous stroke of luck that this skeleton was available to study and reveal its historic secrets.”It was excavated in 1902 and donated to World Museum Liverpool, where it then survived bombings during the Blitz that destroyed most of the human remains in their collection. We’ve now been able to tell part of the individual’s story, finding that some of his ancestry came from the Fertile Crescent, highlighting mixture between groups at this time,” he said.The new research has been published in the journal Nature.A DNA bone test on a man who lived 4,500 years ago in the Nile Valley has shed new light on the rise of the Ancient Egyptian civilisation.An analysis of his skeleton shows that a fifth of his DNA came from ancestors living 1,500km away in the other great civilisation of the time, in Mesopotamia or modern day Iraq.It is the first biological evidence of links between the two civilisations, and could help explain how Egypt was transformed from a disparate collection of farming communities to one of the mightiest civilisations on Earth.The findings lend new weight to the view that writing and agriculture arose through the exchange of people and ideas between these two ancient worlds. …
