In the last 50 years, archaeologists have been looking through old relics to try to tell the story of different peoples, now they are starting to use the people themselves. They are using mummified corpses and soft tissue from dead people and animals from places like Egypt. The tool they are using is DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The scientists extract DNA molecules from soft preserved tissue and then using a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) they duplicate the DNA up to several million times which then yields plenty for analysis. The first breakthrough came in 1989 when research groups from England, Japan, and France successfully removed DNA from preserved teeth, bones and hard tissue.
These findings can ultimately help in determining the genealogy of the Egyptian kings and queens because it is now possible to extract some of the major components of the makeup of these people. They can tell from the DNA of the kings and queens the possible lineages they possess. This means that perhaps they can find out if one of these people was related to another and how they were related. Because there were marriages between brothers and sisters, some of the offspring will have the same DNA sequence, which will then tell scientists who some of the unknown mummies are that were found in tombs of others.
This will not only be useful in determining the lineages among kings and queens, but it will also tell us about the commoners of the time, such as those that were found in a cemetery at Fag el Gamous in Fayum. They found multiple burials in a single grave, often two adults and one or more children or several children buried with a single adult. Until this point, we would not know what these people had died from but now with this technology, it is possible to gage what type of diseases were present in their era and if they were the cause of death.
It has been determined that tuberculosis was present and it is likely that cholera and malaria were also present. This information was found after recovering DNA fragments of the pathogenic bacteria in the remaining tissue of the people.