I found this a little while ago and bookmarked it because it’s a goldmine of really cool info about the earliest movements of people. It’s a map from Wikipedia on Early Human Migrations, and the whole article is great. I’ll paste an example below, but really, it’s worth a read.
Populations of Homo sapiens migrated to the Levant and to Europe[dubious – discuss] between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago, and possibly in earlier waves as early as 185,000 years ago.
A fragment of a jawbone with eight teeth found at Misliya Cave has been dated to around 185,000 years ago. Layers dating from between 250,000 and 140,000 years ago in the same cave contained tools of the Levallois type which could put the date of the first migration even earlier if the tools can be associated with the modern human jawbone finds.
So many fascinating things in there thanks for sharing. It’s interesting that Homo sapiens got to other continents 200,000 years ago, but failed to survive there until 50,000 years ago.
I always look at these numbers and think “how did they get so far on foot?” And then I find it fun to try to imagine how it would happen in terms of individual people’s lifetimes. We’re talking about 100,000 years to get from Kenya to Greece (about 5,000 miles on foot), for people who probably lived about 30 years (ie ~3,300 generations of people). That could easily be accomplished if each new generation moved just 2 miles away from where they were born in their lifetime. Suddenly that feels more relatable.
That’s a fascinating way of looking at it. I’ve always wondered too and never thought about it that way. Thanks for sharing.
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And here I thought I included the image of the map itself… oops! Here it is
