Migration

When thinking about my migration project, I wanted to either look into animal migration or early human migration throughout history.

From my Google search of the definition of migration, this is what I discovered that it is;
1. seasonal movement of animals from one region to another.
2. movement from one part of something to another.

I decided to skim read about both types of migration and found early human migration to be a far more interesting topic.

The first creatures to be classified as part of the human race evolved in Africa about 2 million years ago.

According to the genetic and palaeontological record, we only started to leave African between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago. It is believed that humans migrated because of the major climate changes that were happening around then which was the Earth's climate severely cooling down driven by the onset of one of the worst parts of the last Ice Age. This had a vast effect of the human race at the time and it is predicted that our population dropped down to fewer than 10,000 people.

After 70,000 years ago when the climate began to change and improve, so did the population. The population expanded and some explorers began to venture beyond Africa. The first ones to colonize the Eurasian landmass are said to have settled in modern-day Yemen and travelled across the Bab-al-Mandab Strait that separates Yemen from Djibouti. They later on spread along the coast to India, and reached South-east Asian and Australia by 50,000 years ago. By this time our species had made it all across the globe.

Around 50,000 years ago a second group had also began to venture out of Africa into the Middle East and Central Asia. From these bases they could then go on to colonise the northern latitudes of Asia, Europe, and beyond.

By 20,000 years ago a small group of Asian hunters, braved the storm and entered the East Asian Arctic during the Last Glacial Maximum. The ice sheets covering the far north had sucked up the Earth's moisture and dropped the sea levels by more than 300 feet. This exposed the land bridge that connected the Old World to the New, joining Asia to the Americas. Crossing this bridge meant the hunters had made the final great leap of the human journey. By 15,000 years ago they had taken the land south of the ice and within a thousand years they had even made it to the tip of South America, some even making the journey by sea.

However there is more to the story than just this. Agricultural rises around 10,000 years ago led to a population explosion and left a dramatic impact on the human gene pool. Empires rising and ocean-going voyages of the Polynesians, and the extraordinary increase in global migration over the past 500 years leave many human journey questions unanswered.

I also watched this video on Vimeo about the scientific side of the whole migration story which shows the actual jawbones and excavated molars etc.

Science Bulletins: Early Migration for Modern Humans from AMNH on Vimeo.


Sources:
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/