HUMAN EVOLUTION × GENETICS

Out of Africa

~60,000 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Late Pleistocene

Genomes from a hundred and forty-two populations converge on one great expansion out of Africa between sixty and forty thousand years ago, the same window as the last known contacts with Neanderthals. It was not the first attempt: an upper jaw from Israel puts people in the Levant nearly two hundred thousand years ago, and they left no descendants anyone can detect.

Why it matters

Every population outside Africa descends mostly from that one dispersal, which is why humans everywhere are so closely related. But tracing ancestry further back does not lead to a birthplace: our lines run through African groups that separated and rejoined over hundreds of thousands of years, without ever converging on one region.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

The dispersal that peopled the world is dated by genomes to roughly 60 ka, but earlier excursions reached the Levant between 194 and 177 ka and left no detectable descendants. No single departure date fits every line of evidence.

Sources

1. Bergström et al. (2021), Nature · Origins of modern human ancestry
2. Mallick et al. (2016), Nature · The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations
3. Hershkovitz et al. (2018), Science · The earliest modern humans outside Africa

Earth history as one day

23:59:581.1 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day