May 29, 2015 11:00 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The first modern humans likely came out of African, but where in has now been challenged.

According to Live Science, a new study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics suggests the earliest modern humans exited African through Egypt, not Ethiopia. Better accuracy in man's history will help scientists more accurately explain their evolution and dispersion across the world.

"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," study lead author Luca Pagani, of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, said in a press release. "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.

"This information will be of great value as a freely available reference panel for future medical and anthropological studies in these areas."

The study authors now suggest Eurasians began to genetically drift from Egyptians some 55,000 years ago, from Ethiopians 10,000 years later and from West Africans another 10,000 years after that.

"The most exciting consequence of our results is to have unveiled an episode of the evolutionary past of all Eurasians," Pagani told Live Science, "therefore potentially improving the knowledge of billions of people on their deep biological history."

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