The anthropological community has long accepted Ethiopia as the gateway to the Middle East, Europe, and Asia taken by the earliest humans almost 60,000 years ago. A new study, however, suggests that this may not actually be the case. According to EurekAlert, the majority of nomadic North Africans may have reached other continents by way of Egypt instead.

A new genetic analysis of modern day North Africans has revealed that the migratory path taken tens of thousands of years ago may actually be much different than we thought. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Luca Pagani of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the university of Cambridge in the UK, he and his team analyzed the DNA of six modern northeast African groups – one group of 100 Egyptians and five groups of 25 Ethiopians each.

“Two geographically plausible routes have been proposed,” Dr. Pagani said. The first was “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.” The research produced the first comprehensive set of standardized genetic data for Northeast Africans.

After controlling for more recent migration events, Dr. Pagani determined that the DNA from the Egyptian sample was overwhelmingly more similar to modern Eurasian populations than was the Ethiopian DNA. This suggests to Dr. Pagani and his colleagues that migrants primarily used Egypt as a byway out of Africa, reproducing and settling along the way.

The study offers fascinating insight into the evolution of modern day humanity, and contributes a comprehensive catalog of the genetic makeup of large sections of Egyptian and Ethiopian populations. Dr. Pagani hopes that the information will be valuable as a reference for future medical and anthropological studies.

The study was published this Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics.