Egypt
(IN PHOTO)Tourists ride horse carts and camels at the Giza pyramids area on the outskirts of Cairo, April 27, 2015. Local media reported Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh al-Damaty attended the opening of two tombs that were under rennovation on Monday. One tomb belongs to the Priest of King Khufu while the other belongs to his eldest son. REUTERS

Scientists, through their previous studies, were able to establish that all modern-day human populations have common ancestry whose origins lies in the African subcontinent but were clueless as to which route they took while migrating out of Africa to Eurasia. Now, a new study has indicated that the ancestors of the present-day Asians and Europeans who moved out of Africa around some 60,000 years ago, did so via Egypt and not Ethiopia. The study findings have been published in the American Journal of Human Genetics and has added a very crucial piece of information to the evolutionary past of the modern-day man.

Earlier, scientists believed that the path out of Africa taken by the ancient man was southward. But the new genomic analysis carried out on people currently residing in Ethiopia and Egypt suggest that Egypt was the major gateway out of Africa and that migration followed a northern route and not southern, as previously thought. For their analytical study on the human migration and their path, the study author, Dr Luca Pagani from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, UK, along with his team, carried out genomic studies on people living in the Northeast African region, comprising of 100 Egyptians and five Ethiopian populations.

Pagani explains that "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. 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."

The genomic analysis led to the conclusion that while migrating out of African, our ancestors last stop in the continent was most likely to be Egypt. While providing the vital information on the human migration and its evolutionary past, the study team has developed an extensive catalogue comprising of the genomic diversity presented by the populations living in the African countries of Ethiopia and Egypt. In a concluding note, Pagani adds that "This information will be of great value as a freely available reference panel for future medical and anthropological studies in these areas."

To contact the writer, email:ruchira.dhoke@gmail.com

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