Can’t we think of it as just one large land mass? Maybe 5000 years ago the Sinai peninsula was more land, less sea—the Red Sea not as big, and the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba as we know it now was land mass. Then it wouldn’t be hard to imagine freedom of travel in all kinds of directions.

> 5000 years ago the Sinai peninsula was more land, less sea—the Red Sea not as big, and the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba as we know it now was land mass.

5,000 is a split second in geological terms. We KNOW how Sinai and the Red Sea looks like 5000 or 20,000 years ago.

The key isn't shifting land masses, but the fact that even with the existing terrain, people were moving, trading, and mixing across these regions

The authors actually hypothesize that the Sinai desert was not the main migration path to Egypt here, that's speculative.

That said, it's essentially how most people think of the Mediterranean basin by the middle bronze age, not too much later than this.