Weill Cornell Team Finds New Human Migration Pattern

A team of genome researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and Qatar  have  discovered that indigenous Arabs can directly trace their ancestors to migrants from Africa. “One of the exciting things of genomics is that more and more people are being
sequenced.”
– Prof. Jason Mezey

A conclusion which the team published in January’s edition of Genome Research and contradicts long-standing beliefs about human migration and evolution patterns, according to the University press. “Our study shows that, if you look at the entire genome, not only was a residual population on the Arabian peninsula established after the out of Africa migration but indigenous Arabs currently residing on the Arabian peninsula can trace part of their ancestry back to this ancient population,”said Jason Mezey, a professor of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell and genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. According to Mezey, scientists have proposed multiple theories about the trajectory of human migration.  Before this study, scientists commonly believed that the original strain of the population that migrated out of Africa had ultimately died out because the Arabian Peninsula today is a mix of Arabs, Europeans and other neighboring regions. In this study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 104 Arabian Peninsula natives and compared them with 1,092 genomes from worldwide populations, according to the University .