The map you see above these lines has a strange orientation and a curious coloration, but its meaning is essential for the human species: it summarizes at a glance that everyone comes from the same place and that it took us 200,000 years to get everywhere. Spoiler: in the long run, we all come from Africa. Our ancestors moved, the question is when, how and where.
What is this mapto. These answers are synthesized by the map “A Walk Through Time“, the work of cartographer Jeff Blossom from the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis, dates back to 2013 and is part of the National Geographic Out of Eden Walk project. For its preparation, he used data from National Geographic Maps and ESRI geospatial layers.
The map uses a special projection to stretch the world map without any ocean cutting it (Dymaxion map or Fuller projection) and the colors follow the rainbow: red represents the oldest and magenta the most recent. That is, from 200,000 years ago in Africa to America about 10,000 years ago. The years that appear on the map are thousands of years before the present and indicate when humans arrived in each area.
A Walk Through Time: Human Migration Throughout History. harvard
Why is it important. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, which science has spent maintaining and demonstrating that all modern humans (Homo sapiens) descend from the same African population. For example, a button: almost 40 years ago Cann, Stoneking and Wilson analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 147 people from around the world and concluded that we all share a common African ancestor.
The map is also important for political reasons: we live in a time when there are people who see migration as a threat. This map reminds us that moving is natural to our species. In fact, the sedentarization of human populations It is a relatively recent phenomenon.
The origin. As in a video game, the “Start” is in East Africa, in the Great Rift Valley, the area of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. There is the region with the highest concentration of ancient human fossils: the oldest remains of Homo sapiens come from the Omo Kibish sites (Ethiopia), which are about 195,000 years old. However, the oldest known human fossils come from Jebel Irhoud (Morocco), with 300,000 years behind it. For more than 130,000 years, humans lived inside Africa without leaving, or at least without leaving a record of it.
The great journey of humanity. 60,000 years ago, something happened that invited humanity to leave Africa, perhaps climate, demographics, or both. The best-known route took the southern coast of Asia and reached Asia in less than 15,000 years. Europe was populated between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, leaving some of the first works of art in history, such as the paintings in the Chauvet cave (France, about 36,000 years ago) or Altamira (Spain, about 35,000 years ago). Evolutionarily speaking, in no time we covered Eurasia.
The sites show that America was the last great conquest of humanity: the first crossed Beringia, between Siberia and Alaska, between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago. However, there are sites such as Chiquihuite Cave (Mexico) that suggest previous arrivals. The tip of South America is the furthest point that humanity has reached from Africa. And that white line? As a curiosity, the white line corresponds to the path of Paul Salopek, a journalist who it was proposed travel the 42,000 kilometers that separate the origin of the species from Tierra del Fuego.
What the map doesn’t say. The map is a great simplification: there was no orderly migration that advances in such a clear and clean way through regions: there were multiple exitsreturns, mixtures with neanderthals and extinctions in the process. In short: everything is much more complex than this rainbow map. A good example is Australia: the map places it between 50,000 and 45,000 years before the present, but there are archaeological evidence from 65,000 years ago. The map does not stand out for its precision, but it serves to give us a glimpse of where we came from and how much it cost us to get here.
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Cover | Harvard, out of Eden
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