The first complete DNA study of an Ancient Egyptian has revealed he was probably a celebrated potter who was given an oddly luxurious burial. The skeleton of a middle-aged man, who lived between 4,500 and 4,800 years ago, was found crammed into a ceramic pot in a tomb cut into the hillside at Nuwayrat, around 165 miles south of Cairo.

Forty years after the first effort to extract mummy DNA, researchers have finally generated a full genome sequence from an ancient Egyptian, who lived when the earliest pyramids were built

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,