2020s CE: (The Levantine Genetics Fallacy — A Recent Genetics Article Proposing That Ancient Egyptians Were of Levantine Background Based on DNA from a Singl…

2020s CE: (The Levantine Genetics Fallacy — A Recent Genetics Article Proposing That Ancient Egyptians Were of Levantine Background Based on DNA from a Single Northern, Late Ancient Egyptian Site Dating More Than Two Thousand Years After the Foundational Period of Egyptian Civilization, Located in an Area with Over a Thousand Years of Recurrent Levantine Immigration Including the Hyksos Invasion of the Seventeenth Century BCE, and Ehret’s Devastating South Boston Analogy Exposing the Methodological Absurdity): The older ideas linger on, and scholars from other fields not versed in the newer findings may still presume them. Ehret singles out a recent genetics article proposing that ancient Egyptians were of Levantine background. But those findings come from a solitary northern, late ancient Egyptian locale — a site dating to more than two thousand years after the foundational period of ancient Egypt — and located in an area that had by that time a history of more than a thousand years of the recurrent immigration of individuals and communities from the Levant. These immigrants included communities of artisans and producers of valued goods, settlements encouraged by the rulers of Egypt. The military invasion of the Hyksos, coming from the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE, and their rule for more than a century over large parts of northern Egypt would also have brought an additional genetic component of Levantine background into those northern regions. Ehret then delivers an analogy so devastating it deserves to become a methodological standard: the level of disconnect between the proposals made in this genetics article and the actual history of ancient Egyptian populations is the same as if one examined DNA from human remains in a late-nineteenth-century cemetery in South Boston, Massachusetts, and then concluded from that localized, time-bound sample that Americans are basically of Irish descent and that the founders of the United States in the eighteenth century would have been primarily Irish too. The analogy is not merely clever. It is precise. It exposes exactly the same methodological error: sampling from a late, geographically marginal, heavily immigrated-into locale and projecting those results backward across millennia and southward across hundreds of kilometers to characterize a founding population that the sample cannot possibly represent.