There’s a a talk abstract out that mentions some moderately ancient DNA info from Egypt, from around 2000 to 3000 years ago.

They [Johannes Krause et al] say “ancient Egyptians shared more Near Eastern ancestry than present-day Egyptians, who received additional Sub-Saharan admixture in more recent times.” Today Egyptians, most of them, have around 20% sub-Saharan ancestry. Apparently it used to be less than that – how much exactly we’ll see when the article comes out, probably. Copts might give you a rough idea of what Egyptians used to be like – whatever the SSA fraction is in modern Copts [probably lower than in typical Egyptians], it was probably lower still 2500 years ago. In particular I would expect that the West African component just wasn’t there yet, although some of the East African component probably was.

I touched upon this in a post a while back, where some geneticists, in the course of an extremely dubious/tenuous/whacked attempt to figure out whether humans left Africa thru Sinai or Yemen, for some insane reason assumed that Egypt used to be black.

The background here is that people whose ancestors came recently out of sub-Saharan Africa want to be able to point to the big historical accomplishments of their ancestors. The problem is that there aren’t any, other than some domesticates, like sorghum. Amerindians have the same problem – they developed some really important crops, but it’s hard to point to a important technique, discovery, idea, or invention that they originated [in many cases because someone in the Old World had already done it, thousands of years earlier].