Humans Leave Africa: A Few Distinct Waves
From Africa and its dark jungles depths
something new started to spread;
Human Migration: How did we leave Africa?
Humans are an African species. Most species of monkeys and almost every species of ape and human ancestor comes from Africa. However, there are now humans all across the globe. And most of those humans have been there for thousands of years, with some significant but pretty minor variations between populations in different places. So how did people get there? And how did these differences occur? Let’s dive in, to the history of human migration.
Human Migration: Waves after waves
The first migrations of humans came out of Africa roughly 2 million years ago. The humans in these waves weren’t like modern humans, they were a slightly older species of human called “Homo Erectus” (see our next post on those guys). However, there was nothing human-like anywhere else outside of Africa initially, so this first wave sent human-like things across the planet, or at least to most of Europe and Asia. Most of this was likely done by walking, but it is also possible there was some crossing of water – likely not on boats, but basic floating rafts.
Once this wave spread out, lots of little populations started forming across Asia. These local populations started to develop some variations and differences, through their interbreeding and isolation.
There were several more large waves. It’s difficult to tell how many, but there was one particularly significant one when reasonably modern humans came about 200,000 years ago. These waves of new humans generally met the native populations of humans and interbred to some small degree. This means that current populations of humans in these areas have some of the genes of these local populations but, not very much (less than 5%). The dominant characteristics of the populations come from these large waves of migration.
The final migration was the ‘modern’ migration wave from 50 – 60,000 years ago. This is the one that genetic evidence for us can solidly be found. We have a lot more evidence about them because we can test ourselves and the local population’s genetics and work backwards from there.
We are sure the migration was of less than 1,000 individuals. There was some interbreeding along the way with some older versions of humans (Denisovans and Neanderthals) but it contributed less than 0,2% to the genome.
One of the interesting bits of history associated with this final wave is that they ended up in Australia. The oceans were much lower, due to large glaciers at the poles at this time – so you could probably walk from South East Asia to Australia. This land bridge then closed, leaving native Australians almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, not being in contact with other humans again until Europeans invaded in the 1700s. This means that Indigenous Australians are strong candidates for having the oldest continuing culture on Earth and closest to what humans really are. Other Indigenous cultures, such as in America and New Zealand happened significantly later, about 10,000 years ago.
Different races: Different species? The ugly history of early human research
There is some deeply ugly history to the study of early humans.
There was a time, surprisingly recently, that people thought there was more than one surviving human species. In particular, people thought that different races (Africans, Asians and Europeans) evolved from different species of humans and had significantly different characteristics. The idea has some intuitive appeal. There are some minor physical differences between people that come from certain areas. In fact, it was the general consensus of almost all scientists 100 years ago that the different races had significant and serious biological grounding and therefore different races had different strengths and weaknesses.
This idea was one of the evilest ideas humans have ever created. A vague scientific curiosity about the origins of humanity rapidly morphed into a racial hierarchy, where scientists thought that certain races were superior to others. Shockingly, the scientists thought that their race, Anglo-Europeans, were the most intelligent and that people from other areas of the world, particularly Africa and Asia were biologically inferior and therefore could be subjugated. These ideas formed the basis of the slavery, genocide and colonialism that still haunt our societies to this day. For example, it was considered that many native peoples were simply ‘dying out’ because they were not adapted for surviving in the modern world. Similar ideas lead to the Naziparty in Germany. It was truly a universal worldview throughout the twentieth century in the Western English-speaking world.
This is all, completely and utterly wrong – morally and factually. Firstly the genetic variation between two people of the human race is tiny, it’s less than 1 or 2%. When put in idealized conditions and given equal opportunities there has never been any evidence that there a difference capability between human races. The definitive statement on human race came from the United Nations Statement on Human race in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II. It was put together by hundreds of scientists desperately trying to rebut the old and evil scientific discourse of a previous generation.
`Science – modern genetics in particular – has constantly affirmed the unity of the human species, and denied that the notion of `race’ has any foundation... the human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity’…
1950 UNESCO Statement on Race
the biological differentiation of races does not exist and that the obvious differences between populations living in different geographical areas of the world should be attributed to the interaction of historical, economic, political, social and cultural factors rather than biological ones.
This also makes sense in terms of the migration pattern of humans. Even the oldest migrations of modern humans happened 60,000 years ago. If you’ve been reading our blog you realize how short a period of time that is. We had anatomically normal humans 300,000 years ago. That means that each of these waves were fundamentally human and could all interbreed. Each wave took the same set of genes and characteristics across the planet, for the most part replacing all the genes of the smaller human populations, that maybe had developed some tiny and minor variations.
Native peoples were dying in the 20th century because they were being killed. The American Government distributed smallpox blankets to native Americans. We are still uncovering new graveyards in Canada for “residential schools”, where native children were abducted and “re-educated”, ripped from their homes and cultures. Almost every Western English-speaking country has an identical history of this. The attitude of most of the world towards people other than themselves in the 20th century was absolutely monstrous. We are going to talk about that a lot more here at The Universal Story in the near future.
Do not let the genocidal whims of the 21st century pollute truth. There is one human race, that originated from Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, and spread out in regular waves to the rest of the world, combining together each time. Anything that makes us look different or separate in the modern world comes from our history of cruelty and genocide and our indifference in not bothering to fix it.
