WIKIMEDIA, BAMSEModern human populations expanded out of Africa some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, but whether the exodus primarily followed a route through North Africa and Egypt, or across the Bab el Mandeb strait to Yemen has been a matter of debate. Now, through an analysis based on sequence comparisons between modern Egyptians, Ethiopians, Europeans, and Asians, researchers from the University of Cambridge and their colleagues suggest that the Northern route is most likely. The results of the study are published today (May 28) in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
“This paper goes much further beyond any of the other prior genetic studies in really trying to address this question [of route],” said human evolutionary geneticist Brenna Henn of Stony Brook University in New York who was not involved in the work. “There are many caveats associated with this type of work but it’s impressive that they tried to very explicitly test this hypothesis . . . I give them kudos for that.”
Europeans and Asians (Eurasians) are, for the most part, fairly genetically homogeneous and thus most likely descended from a single group of modern humans who left Africa, said Luca Pagani of Cambridge who led the study. However, whether these early migrants traveled up the Nile and out of Africa via Egypt (Northern ...
