Climate and the peopling of the world

The human dispersal out of Africa that populated the world was probably paced by climate changes. This is the inference drawn from computer modelling of climate variability during the time of early human migration. See Letter p.92 Climate-led human migration Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, but the t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 2016-10, Vol.538 (7623), p.49-50
Main Authors: deMenocal, Peter B., Stringer, Chris
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/106
706/689/19
Climate
Climate change
Hominids
Humanities and Social Sciences
Migration
multidisciplinary
news-and-views
Population
Science
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Summary:The human dispersal out of Africa that populated the world was probably paced by climate changes. This is the inference drawn from computer modelling of climate variability during the time of early human migration. See Letter p.92 Climate-led human migration Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, but the timing of our ancestors' dispersal to the rest of the world has been a source of controversy. Here Axel Timmermann and Tobias Friedrich model the dispersal in the context of the pronounced changes in climate and sea-level during the past 125,000 years. Their results suggest that dispersal across the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant was not a single event, but was concentrated in four distinct waves between 106,000 and 29,000 years ago. The findings agree with archaeological data and show that orbital-scale global climate swings played a key role in population movements, whereas millennial-scale abrupt climate changes had more limited, regional effects.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/nature19471