Beginnings: Africa and Beyond

Archaeology and human genomes preserve information of Homo sapiens spreading, from the edge of Africa across Eurasia and beyond. These records are complex, difficult to date and interpret, but they are testimony to the dispersion of humans. Each kind of evidence has different qualities: archaeology precisely locates hominids geographically but often cannot specify taxonomic identity; genomic analysis describes phylogeny but often cannot specify historical geography. Genomic evidence increasingly shows H. sapiens exited from Africa multiple times over the last 250,000 years, and humans were resident in Western Asia for much of the last 130,000 years. New lineages evolved and sometime in the last 90,000 years, territorial expansion took place. H. sapiens occupied much of Eurasia and eventually island Southeast Asia, Sahul, and the New World. New genetic lineages also emerged in Eastern Eurasia, spreading westward. Gene flow and migration are imprecisely dated, and mapping genomic history onto archaeological evidence is difficult. Nevertheless, archaeology provides parallel evidence of H. sapiens in southern Europe and Western Asia over the last 200,000 years, and of colonisation of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Sahul taking place 50–100,000 years ago. This chapter examines evidence for that dispersion.