Out of Africa

Groups of our species left Africa more than once. Most people outside Africa today descend from groups that spread out about 70,000 to 50,000 years ago, reaching Australia and Europe within a few thousand years.

Date: About 120,000 to 40,000 years agoII · Our species and the Old Stone Age
Place: Misliya Cave, Israel · The Bab el-Mandeb strait · Ust’-Ishim, Siberia · Madjedbebe, AustraliaThe whole world
Laid out as: A migrationPeople on the move: where they set out from, where they went, and what they found.
Lessons: 5 planned, none written yet
Themes: Human origins and evolution
Exploration and migration
Environment, climate and disasters

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

From Misliya Cave, Israelto Madjedbebe, Australia

IEarly tries: Misliya and Skhul
IIThe southern route
IIIReaching Sahul by sea
IVInto Europe
VWhat ancient DNA shows

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

Israel Hershkovitz
Chris Stringer

Objects

The Misliya jaw
The Ust’-Ishim thigh bone

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestry Our species and the Old Stone Age Farming and the New Stone Age First cities and the Bronze Age The Iron Age and growing states The classical world After the empires Medieval networks and empires Oceans crossed Revolutions and the first factories Industry, empire and world war The world since 1945

122,000 years ago to 42,000 years ago. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

Fire and the first hearths outline
The long human story written

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?