More than half of European men related to Egyptian King Tut: Study

More than half of Western European men are related to Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen, according to a new study.

A personal genomics company in Switzerland says they reconstructed a DNA profile of the boy king by watching the Discovery Channel, and discovered that it belongs to a group, into which 50 % of men in Western Europe are also classified, indicating that they’ve got an ancestor in common.

If the claims were true, it would put King Tut in a genetic profile group shared by more than half of Western European men. That would make those men relatives — albeit distant ones — of the pharaoh.

The alleged Discovery Channel markers put Tut in a genetic profile group, or haplogroup, that also includes more than half of the men in Western Europe.

Scholz said the company is now searching for the closest living relatives of Tutankhamen, men who share all 16 genetic markers on the pharaoh's supposed Y chromosome.

The haplogroup R1b1a2, which iGENEA claims includes King Tut, arose 9,500 years ago in the Black Sea region.

How Tut’s ancestors would have gotten from that region to Egypt is unknown, but Scholz said iGENEA hopes to learn more by collecting more close and exact matches from modern people of Western European descent.

“The better the match, the more recent the common ancestor,” Live Science quoted Scholz as saying.