Unwrapping Der Movement’s Mummified Brain

More lies about Ancient Egypt. In all cases, emphasis added.

Counter-Currents lies about Ancient Egypt. 

Interestingly, the ancient Egyptians were genetically closer to Europeans than they were to modern Egyptians, who have a substantial degree of sub-Saharan admixture. Their genetic composition remained remarkably stable over the course of their history, and the flow of sub-Saharan DNA into Egypt did not occur until after the Roman period.

I have previously written about this paper and “movement” lies about it.  Also see here. 

The PCA of the Egypt paper (see Fig 4 and supplementary Figure 3) show Ancient Egyptians in the same general area as modern Near Easterners and close to Modern Egyptians, certainly closer to Modern Egyptians than to any Europeans. While that has all the usual caveats of PCA, these PCA data do not support the idea that Ancient Egyptians were genetically closer to Europeans than to Modern Egyptians and any semi-literate reading of the paper would have told you that. Even though it is true that two populations can be close in PCA without having the same ancestry, in the case of Ancient and Modern Egyptians we are considering two populations from the same locale, with a known historical link.  

The f3 data from Figure 5 are more equivocal and could be used to support the Counter-Currents narrative. in this sense, the Counter-Currents argument here is not completely flawed  The problem is that outgroup f3 suffers from some of the same flaws as Fst, and is sensitive to the choice of populations used. All of these problems could have been avoided if the authors had simply utilized genetic kinship assays. The f3 statistic is in my opinion an absolutely lousy approach for measuring genetic similarity.  The fact that the PCA and f3 data match poorly indicates a problem here.

In summary, the PCA data refute the Counter-Currents narrative, while the F3 data seem to support it.  But what about Negro admixture?  First, let's consider the mitochondrial data (such data are essentially useless for individuals but have some utility for larger sample sizes):

We observe highly similar haplogroup profiles between the three ancient groups (Fig. 3a), supported by low FST values (<0.05) and P values >0.1 for the continuity test. Modern Egyptians share this profile but in addition show a marked increase of African mtDNA lineages L0–L4 up to 20% (consistent with nuclear estimates of 80% non-African ancestry reported in Pagani et al.17). Genetic continuity between ancient and modern Egyptians cannot be ruled out by our formal test despite this sub-Saharan African influx, while continuity with modern Ethiopians17, who carry >60% African L lineages, is not supported (Supplementary Data 5). To further test genetic affinities and shared ancestry with modern-day African and West Eurasian populations we performed a principal component analysis (PCA) based on haplogroup frequencies and Multidimensional Scaling of pairwise genetic distances. We find that all three ancient Egyptian groups cluster together (Fig. 3b), supporting genetic continuity across our 1,300-year transect. Both analyses reveal higher affinities with modern populations from the Near East and the Levant compared to modern Egyptians (Fig. 3b,c).

As regards levels of Negro admixture: There is ADDITIONAL Negro ancestry in the moderns, not starting from a ancient baseline of zero. While it is true that the bulk of Negro ancestry came in the past 2000 years, the ancients did have a little. Ancient Egyptians were essentially Near Easterners with trace Negro ancestry; modern Egyptians have a larger Negro influx. From the paper:

….modern Egyptians inherit 8% more ancestry from African ancestors than the three ancient Egyptians do, which is also consistent with the ADMIXTURE results discussed above. Absolute estimates of African ancestry using these two methods in the three ancient individuals range from 6 to 15%, and in the modern samples from 14 to 21% depending on method and choice of reference populations

However, we note that all our genetic data were obtained from a single site in Middle Egypt and may not be representative for all of ancient Egypt. It is possible that populations in the south of Egypt were more closely related to those of Nubia and had a higher sub-Saharan genetic component, in which case the argument for an influx of sub-Saharan ancestries after the Roman Period might only be partially valid and have to be nuanced.

Der Movement = wrong.