Have you ever been to Africa? According to the latest studies on human diversity, you have! Scientists identified that sub-Saharan Africa is the place where the human migration phenomenon began 100,000 years ago, when a small group of humans headed for North Africa and Middle East, and kept on going ever since, reaching the farthest continents of Americas and Australia.

Up until this point, theories on a global migration with an African starting point have been circulating, but none of them brought the arguments and evidence this study did on the topic. “It’s like looking back at the earth with a telescope a thousand times more powerful than what you had before,” said Richard Myers from Stanford University school of Medicine, the journal Science reports.

Two studies have already been published in the journals Science and Nature on the patterns of genetic mutations and human diversity, and based on the similar DNA samples, proved one common conclusion: the modern human left Africa (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to be more precise), traversed Central Asia and continued heading east and west to Europe, Asia and Americas.

Another genetic study, similar to the other two and published in the journal Nature, concluded that after the African migration, the newly settled European population started losing its genetic diversity and at the same time, while continuing to expand on the continent, they started accumulating a series of genetic mutations before older ones, with potentially negative impacts, have had the chance to wear out.

What was very surprising was that many of the groups thought to have one well established origin actually presented traces to several continents. This was the case of the Bedouins in the Middle East, who were traced back to Europe and Pakistan, or the Yakut population, who should have the most similarities with the Siberians, but actually relate to East Asia, Europe and American Indians.

The conclusion draw attention to the fact that we are much more related than we think we are, curiously enough, to people on different parts of the world, more than we are to people around us. “A huge amount of our genomes are the same across the world, and that helps to argue against racism in my view,” Myers said the journal Nature.