Mitochondrial haplotyping in an Egyptian mummy

Takabuti was a female who lived in ancient Egypt during the 25th Dynasty, c. 660 BCE. Her mummified remains were brought to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1834 and are currently displayed in the Ulster Museum. To gain insight into Takabuti's ancestry, we used deep sampling of vertebral bone, under X-ray control, to obtain non-contaminated bone tissue from which we extracted ancient DNA using a preparation method highly optimised for ancient DNA samples. We selectively targeted the maternally inherited mitochondrial genome which is known to be highly informative for human ancestry typing and identified 38 single nucleotide variants using next generation sequencing. The specific combination of these SNVs indicates that Takabuti belonged to mitochondrial haplogroup H4a1. Neither H4 nor H4a1 have been reported in ancient Egyptian samples, prior to this study. The modern distribution of this haplogroup is rare and sporadic and has been identified in areas including the Canary Islands, southern Iberia and the Lebanon. H4a1 has also been reported in ancient samples from Bell Beaker and Unetice contexts in Germany. The implications of identifying a rare haplogroup in an ancient population are discussed.