Out of Africa,
across the whole Earth
We are one species, born in Africa. Travel from 300,000 years ago — when every human alive lived on one continent — to today, and watch our ancestors people the world: where they went, who they were in their genes, and the world of ice and sea that shaped every step.
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What you can explore
One deep-time scrubber drives it all — press play and watch the human family branch and spread across a living globe.
Coloured by ancestry
Each region glows with the deep genetic lineage of the people who lived there — mtDNA & Y-DNA haplogroups, ancient-DNA samples and their living descendants. Watch the colours of humankind diverge.
The great migrations
Animated arcs trace every journey — out of Africa, the first sea crossing to Australia, into Ice-Age Europe, over Beringia to the Americas, and across the open Pacific to New Zealand (settled last, ~1300 CE).
Sites & discoveries
Fossils, first art, burials and breakthroughs light up at their date — Jebel Irhoud, Blombos, Lake Mungo, Denisova, Göbekli Tepe, Monte Verde and more, each with its story.
The Ice-Age world
See why people moved: ice sheets wall off the north, seas fall ~120 m to open land bridges, great lakes fill and dry, and a gauge reads the global temperature and sea level through the glacial cycles.
The other humans
Neanderthals, Denisovans and the Flores “Hobbit” appear as ranges that wink out as we spread — the cousins we lived alongside, and, for two of them, interbred with. Their DNA is still in us.
Guided tour & sharing
Take a narrated, hands-free play-through of the whole story — or share any moment with a link that opens the globe at that exact time and place.
One species, one origin
A visual story of human prehistory and archaeogenetics — coarse and approximate by nature, and honest about it.
Honest about the science
Deep prehistory is uncertain and fast-moving. Every date, range and population here is an approximation, often debated; regions are coarse “where-ish” zones, not borders; and genetics are reduced to a few characteristic lineages. We open in a proposed southern-African “cradle”, but present it as one contested idea alongside the prevailing pan-African origin. The deeper the past, the fuzzier it becomes — that uncertainty is part of the story.