We are one species, born in Africa. Watch our ancestors spread from a single cradle to every corner of the Earth — and see who they were, in their bones and their genes.
Dates, ranges and genetics are simplified and approximate — and the deeper the past, the more uncertain. See About & sources.
A living atlas of the human journey. Drag the timeline to travel from 300,000 years ago — when Homo sapiens was confined to Africa — to today, and watch our ancestors people the world. Each lit region is coloured by the deep genetic lineage of the people who lived there then; animated arcs trace the great migrations; dots mark the fossils, art and sites that tell the story; and the Ice-Age world of land bridges, vanished lakes and lower seas shifts beneath.
Please read this: deep prehistory is uncertain and fast-moving. Every date, range, boundary and population here is an approximation, often debated, and the regions are coarse "where-ish" zones, not borders. Genetics are reduced to a few characteristic lineages (mtDNA / Y-DNA haplogroups + notable ancient-DNA samples + living descendants) — real ancestry is a blend. Ice sheets, sea level and temperature are simplified sketches of the glacial cycles, and the other humans (Neanderthals, Denisovans and their cousins) are shown as rough ranges ending at approximate extinction dates. The deeper the past, the fuzzier it all becomes.
On the "cradle": we open in Africa and highlight a proposed southern-African homeland (the Makgadikgadi wetland, mtDNA L0). That single-origin idea is contested; most researchers now favour a pan-African origin — H. sapiens emerging from populations spread across the whole continent (the oldest fossils, Jebel Irhoud, are in Morocco). We show both.
Built on the science of palaeoanthropology and archaeogenetics — work by the labs of Pääbo, Reich, Willerslev, Tishkoff and many others; key studies include Hublin et al. 2017 (Jebel Irhoud), Vidal et al. 2022 (Omo), Clarkson et al. 2017 (Madjedbebe), Chan et al. 2019 (southern-African mtDNA), and the Lapita/Polynesian and steppe/Anatolian ancient-DNA literature. Globe: globe.gl. Base map: Natural Earth (public domain). Palaeogeography after published reconstructions. A companion to A History of Nations · 42-apps. Made with much curiosity — and fun.