Baboon mummy DNA from ancient Egypt reveals location of mysterious port city not on any maps
By Stephanie Pappas published about 3 hours ago
A new DNA study suggests that the lost realm of Punt and the port city of Adulis may have been in the same place, separated by time.
Ancient Egyptians traded with people in what is today coastal Eritrea to bring baboons to their temples, according to a new study of baboon mummy DNA.
Ancient Egyptians were big fans of baboons, which they associated with the god Babi, a god of the underworld and the deity Thoth, who was sometimes depicted with the head of a baboon. They kept the monkeys in captivity, removing their sharp incisors so they were less dangerous, and often mummified them as offerings to the gods. But as far as anyone can tell, baboons have never naturally occurred in Egypt, said Gisela Kopp, a geneticist at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the leader of a new study on the baboon DNA.
"There were these stories that they got them from Punt, this fabled, mysterious land," Kopp told Live Science.
Though Punt was mentioned in ancient Egyptian documents, it was never identifiable on a map. In 2020, Nathaniel Dominy, a primatologist at Dartmouth College used molecules from ancient baboon mummy teeth to reveal the baboons' diets in early life; he found that they came from a region encompassing modern-day Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The baboons in that study dated back to Egypt's New Kingdom, between 1550 B.C. to 1070B.C. It was the first hard evidence for the location of Punt.
Now, Kopp and her colleagues (including Dominy) have narrowed that location down using DNA evidence. In a study published Sept. 28 in the journal eLife, they managed to extract DNA from a mummified baboon dating to between 800 B.C. and 540 B.C.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/baboon-mummy-dna-from-ancient-egypt-reveals-location-of-mysterious-port-city-not-on-any-maps
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And it's wonderful!
I have to laugh at how quickly I diverted my browse of the "latest" page when I saw this OP, that record scratch sound might describe it.
