More than 4,000 years ago, Egypt and Mesopotamia stood as two of the most complex societies on the planet. But the new DNA sequencing reveals how these two populations also intermingled.

Scientists have for the first time sequenced the most complete and oldest ancient Egyptian genome ever found—unlocking new secrets from the Old Kingdom.

But while experts now know a fair amount about ancient Egyptian life, they still understand very little about the population’s genetic makeup. Researchers have genomically analyzed three specimens to date,