The Royal Cemetery of Ur (c. 2600-2450 BCE), excavated by Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934, yielded skeletal remains of exceptional preservation including those of Queen Puabi (PG 800), one of the best-documented individuals in the early Sumerian archaeological record. This paper proposes that ancient DNA analysis of Queen Puabi and a targeted selection of other Ur Royal Cemetery specimens represents a significant and currently unexploited opportunity for archaeogenetic research. Specifically, we propose testing whether specimens from this elite population show evidence of archaic hominin genetic contribution beyond the Neanderthal and Denisovan admixture already documented in modern and ancient human genomes — that is, whether a third previously uncharacterised archaic source is detectable in this sample. We further propose testing whether the genetic profile of the Ur Royal Cemetery elite population is consistent with, or distinct from, contemporaneous Bronze Age populations in the surrounding region. The proposal is grounded in three converging lines of evidence: the exceptional documentary record of the Ur III period which describes the ruling elite as possessing a non-human or semi-divine genetic heritage; the morphological distinctiveness documented for certain Ur Royal Cemetery specimens; and the established methodological framework for identifying archaic hominin admixture in ancient DNA, validated by the Nobel Prize-winning work of Svante Paabo and colleagues. We do not pre-specify the expected result. We propose the analysis because the question is scientifically legitimate, the specimens are archaeologically significant, the methodology is established, and the result — whatever it is — would be of substantial interest to the archaeogenetics community.
Robert James Hefferan (Sun,) studied this question.
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