Of course, ancient Egyptians were not San Bushmen, whose genetic markers peter out north of Zimbabwe (Soodyall and Jenkins, 2006; Wells, 2006). Nevertheless, the Neolithic inhabitants of the Nile Valley some 10 000 years ago, from whom pre-Dynastic Egyptians evolved over the next 5 000 years, must have been, like pygmy and proto-Khoisanoid hunter-gatherers from further south, instances of the diverse Stone Age human groups who were spread throughout eastern, central and southern Africa before the beginning of the Bantu-speaker migrations that would in due course supplant hunter-gatherers from large parts of the continent. We have already encountered Spencer Wells's suggestion, based on the early findings of National Geographic's Genographic Project, that ‘people similar in appearance to the modern San Bushmen’ lived as far north as Ethiopia in the Holocene era. Further north, we know of the even earlier Sangoan peoples of the Khartoum Mesolithic, whose culture, it has been suggested, may have been the ultimate source of north-east African civilisation (Welsby and Anderson, 2004). Where might the earliest ‘Egyptians’ have fitted into these configurations?

Assessing the ethnic composition of ancient Egypt's population is a notoriously Procrustean exercise, and, as my epigraph suggests, many Egyptologists would regard it as best left alone. Standard textbooks such as Douglas J. Brewer and Emily Teeter's Egypt and the Egyptians (1999) make no reference to Egypt's ethnic composition. Beatrix Midant-Reynes confesses towards the end of her otherwise comprehensive Prehistory of Egypt (1992/2000a) that the ‘physical anthropology’ of Egypt is ‘a subject upon which we have been very unforthcoming throughout this book’ (251). She does, however, refer the reader to Patricia Podzorski's very detailed ‘Examination of Predynastic Human Skeletal Remains from Naga-ed- Der’ (1990), which focuses on a cache of human remains from just north of Abydos collected by Flinders Petrie around 1900 and neglected ever since.