New genomic analyses have revealed the earliest humans (who evolved in Africa) spread out into Europe and Asia or Eurasia through Egypt some 60,000 years ago.
The study just published in the American Journal of Human Genetics seems to settle the long-standing debate as to whether early humans that are the ancestors of modern Eurasians came out of Africa by via Egypt or via Ethiopia. It also established that human migration from Africa followed a northern instead of a southern route.
This information adds to information that should greatly assist other scientists reconstruct humans' evolutionary past.
Dr. Luca Pagani of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge in the UK, and his colleagues analyzed the genetic information from six modern Northeast African populations (100 Egyptians and five Ethiopian populations each represented by 25 people) in their effort to uncover the migratory path human ancestors of present-day Europeans and Asians took when they left Africa some 60,000 years ago,
"Two geographically plausible routes have been proposed: an exit through the current Egypt and Sinai, which is the northern route, or one through Ethiopia, the Bab el Mandeb strait, and the Arabian Peninsula, which is the southern route," said Dr. Pagani.
"In our research, we generated the first comprehensive set of unbiased genomic data from Northeast Africans and observed, after controlling for recent migrations, a higher genetic similarity between Egyptians and Eurasians than between Ethiopians and Eurasians."
He said this suggests that Egypt was most likely the last stop on the way out of Africa.
Researchers also developed an extensive public catalog of the genomic diversity in Ethiopian and Egyptian populations.
"This information will be of great value as a freely available reference panel for future medical and anthropological studies in these areas," said Dr. Pagani.
The Northern Route taken out of Africa trough Egypt agrees with the known genetic mixture of all non-Africans with Neanderthals, who were present in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, and with the recent discovery of early modern human fossils in Israel close to the Northern Route dating to some 55,000 years ago, said Phys.org.