Maps first: a timeline of major documented human-migration events, then a small figure and the encyclopedia. Homo sapiens arose in Africa about 300,000 years ago. Each card names when, where, and why: climate, ice, farming, war, trade, empire, slavery: only where scholarship supports it. This is not a map of everyone every fifty years. Attila and the Migration Period stay here; living movements live on Great migrations.
Event cards, not a regular time grid. Each movement has a dated range, a route or region, drivers only where scholarship supports them, and a source. Hunnic pressure stays on this Humans shelf. Great migrations is for living mass movements, not a second Attila page.
A timeline of well-documented movements: not a map of everyone every fifty years. Pleistocene cards are teaching arrows on NASA Blue Marble. Later cards are published plates. Gaps are labeled. We do not invent global population choropleths.
Teaching arrow toward Southwest Asia. A dated movement, not GPS of every band.
Nearest openly licensed plate: not an exact-year census.
No openly licensed route plate hosted yet. The arrows are a teaching schematic, not a dated invasion map.
Great migrations → Living mass movements live on that shelf. This plate is a regional schematic of 100-500 CE. Attila is not duplicated there.
Bergström et al., Science, 2020: Late Pleistocene expansion
Dated range: ~70,000-50,000 years ago
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay5012
License:
Site schematic on NASA Blue Marble (public domain)
Schematic base: NASA Blue Marble Next Generation (December 2004, public domain): physical Earth, not a political map and not a population raster.
Public teaching maps, opened on their own sites. Dates stay with the named source. Not a GPS of every band.
California Academy of Sciences interactive: archaeological, genetic, and climate outline of Homo sapiens dispersal from Africa, with a climate timeline. The Academy’s desktop map; they note it is not built for phones.
Open map →Global early fossil find spots, Wikipedia-sourced.
Open map →Atlas of Human Evolution: three era maps: australopithecines, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens: using the atlas’s own period labels.
Open map →Source: Atlas of Human Evolution: interactive maps covering ~7 million years
The usual science frame used on this site: origin in Africa ~300 thousand years ago; Australia / Sahul about 65-50 thousand; a lasting presence in Europe around 45-40 thousand; the Americas about 15-10 thousand, with older claimed sites still debated. Those are arrival windows, not marching years.
Drivers change by step. Wet and dry phases in North Africa and the Levant opened or closed desert corridors. Falling sea level in glacial maxima exposed Sunda and narrowed the water gaps to Sahul. Ice sheets blocked, then later offered, interior routes into the Americas. Coasts, rivers, and game were the resources. Later islands needed boats.
Wildlife · Homo sapiens → Wildlife keeps the species frame: origin, numbers, and the large-mammal genera that vanished after first arrival. This shelf owns the deep-history journey.
Great migrations → Living mass movements: wildebeest, butterflies, Arctic birds: live on a separate shelf. The Migration Period event above is the Attila-era card; it is not duplicated there.
People evolved in Africa. The ~300,000-year date is an origin, not a start gun for walking to Australia. For most of that time the species lived on one continent, with pulses into the Levant that did not found the later worldwide pattern. Africa’s large mammals had already lived beside hominins; that is why this page does not treat African megafauna loss as a “first contact” wave in the same sense as Sahul or the Americas.
A Late Pleistocene expansion about 70,000-50,000 years ago is the one that left most of the ancestry of people living outside Africa today (genetic syntheses such as Bergström et al. 2020). Drivers were not a single “urge to explore.” Green Sahara and Levant windows, then arid barriers, steered when a desert was a road and when it was a wall. The Nile, the Red Sea coasts, and the Bab-el-Mandeb are repeatedly discussed corridors; this site does not pick one unproven track and draw it as fact.
Australia, New Guinea, and Tasmania were joined as Sahul when sea level was lower. Reaching it still meant water crossings from Sunda. Madjedbebe in northern Australia has been dated around 65,000 years (Clarkson et al. 2017); other reviews sit later in a 65-50 thousand window. Either way it is tens of millennia before the Americas. The driver mix is glacial sea-level fall exposing shelves, coastal and island-hopping skill, and tropical resources: not ice-free interior corridors.
Modern humans were in parts of Asia before they were numerous in Europe. A lasting European presence is usually placed around 45,000-40,000 years ago, after Neanderthal populations. Drivers include the productivity of mammoth-steppe hunting landscapes in cold stages, river systems, and the slow opening of higher latitudes as climate allowed. This is not the same clock as Sahul.
Beringia linked Siberia and Alaska when sea level was low. The Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheets then blocked the interior. Pedersen et al. 2016 argued the ice-free corridor became biologically viable too late for the first peoples, which is why a Pacific coastal route is the usual working model for a ~16,000-14,000-year entry, with Clovis later. This encyclopedia uses the site’s 15-10 thousand working window for a widespread presence. Older claims (including White Sands, New Mexico) exist and remain contested; they are not treated here as settled first-arrival dates. Megafauna collapse in the Americas is the arrival wave that Wildlife catalogues: useful as context for why a new predator on a new continent matters, not a species list to paste onto this map.
Madagascar, Remote Oceania, and New Zealand are Holocene stories. New Zealand’s first settlement is on the order of 700 years ago (early fourteenth century in the usual archaeological reading). The driver is seafaring toward new land and birds that had never seen people: not an ice corridor. Island extinctions belong on Wildlife’s Extinct shelf; they are the end of a migration, not a flyway.
