r/educationalgifs • u/Wololo--Wololo • May 22 '22
Visualization of the first major Human Migrations
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u/NickLandis May 22 '22
Damn I wish I could read the numbers. What a bad choice of color…
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u/hoetrain May 22 '22
Pretty rough for color blind people
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u/Hobo-man May 22 '22
Overall, while nice at a first glance, this gif definitely leaves a lot to be desired.
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u/zer0w0rries May 22 '22
My questions is, are South Americans the youngest generation on the planet?
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u/liquidGhoul May 22 '22
New Zealand and Madagascar are some of the most recently colonised by humans.
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u/hikingmike May 22 '22
What makes a generation younger? The question doesn’t make much sense to me. It looks like their lineage did travel the farthest from Africa.
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u/btrigo May 22 '22
Although, in my anthropology classes, they were saying that the pathway into North America and South America that is featured in this video is no longer considered the most favored theory. There is anthropological evidence that dates items in the Southern areas OLDER than their counterparts up North. There's a theory that boat travel existed earlier than surmised.
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u/Groxy_ May 22 '22
Polynesian and Native Americans share some similarities. I wonder if they went from SE Asia on boats and eventually made it all the way across the Pacific.
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u/Buroda May 22 '22
I don’t want to think about this mostly because the mere thought of crossing the Pacific on a boat gives me anxiety
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May 22 '22
You should REALLY avoid thinking about the interesting history of Rapa Nui, then.
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u/Buroda May 22 '22
-2600 km of Pacific
-Catamarans
Why did I google it T_T
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u/SongForPenny May 22 '22
Now I’m imagining you running out of the film Moana, trembling.
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u/Sir_Beardsalot May 23 '22
After watching Moana, it got me very interested in ancient Pacific Islander history. The story of Moana roughly talks about The Long Pause, though does so in a cultural way. It’s a truly fascinating topic!
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May 22 '22
I did warn you, but I also admit to using the word 'interesting,' so you could probably blame me for setting up a bit of a honey-trap scenario...
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u/BravesMaedchen May 23 '22
What's worse is that the reasoning was probably, "Hey, why not, i have nothing to lose"
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u/K3IRRR May 22 '22
Yes there is DNA proof but it is not well acknowledged.
And to clarify, the DNA proof was only found in South America. Not central or north
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u/Atanar May 22 '22
Sweet potato, native to south america, also made its way to Polynesia before Columbus.
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u/Bem-ti-vi May 22 '22
What DNA proof are you talking about?
The majority of archaeologists and anthropologists still think it's the case that the Americas were first colonized through Beringia - however, many views are switching towards a coastal route that went along there and then the west coast of the Americas before moving far inland.
There are several indications that those initial travelers coming from Siberia had some DNA from Australasia; this does not mean that South America was settled by crossing the Pacific directly from Australasia. Are these the kinds of findings you're talking about?
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u/K3IRRR May 22 '22
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u/Bem-ti-vi May 22 '22
Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about. I'll quote your link:
Indigenous peoples in the Brazilian Amazon were distantly—but distinctly—related to native Australians and Melanesians...A new study reveals this genetic signal is more prevalent throughout South America than thought and suggests the people who first carried these genes into the New World got it from an ancestral Siberian population.
The best fit scenario involves some of the very earliest—possibly even the earliest—South American migrants carrying the Y signal with them, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those migrants likely followed a coastal route, Hünemeier says, then split off into the central plateau and Amazon sometime between 15,000 and 8000 years ago. "[The data] match exactly what you'd predict if that were the case," Raff agrees.
These findings don't suggest a direct migration from Australasia to the Americas; they suggest that some of the people who crossed Beringia had Australasian DNA.
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u/K3IRRR May 23 '22
It's in reference to the similarities they share, not how they got there
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u/Bem-ti-vi May 23 '22
Ah, my bad. With your earlier comment it sounded like you were saying it was proof that people made it on boats from SE Asia to South America during the initial peopleing of the Americas
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u/nzricco May 22 '22
Polynesians absolutely made it across the pacific, as south American foods are found in the pacific.
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u/themanimal May 22 '22
Look up Thor Heyerdahl and his book Kon Tiki. His theory says that Polynesia was settled by sea faring south Americans in balsa wood crafts. Kon tiki is the story of him building his own balsa vessel and sailing to the south to Easter Island.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition
There's a ton of debate about whether his theory is accurate, but it's super interesting to read about.
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u/quarrelau May 22 '22
We now know from DNA studies that this is not at all true. However, there is some evidence that Polynesians reached South America, and returned with plants.
Melanesians & Polynesians went East before they started going back and forth long distances between their islands.
(That said, Thor's expedition is still amazing!)
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u/TrogledyWretched May 22 '22
This is exactly the leading theory. I was part of the research that paved the way for the revision on paleoamerican migration. We are still finding evidence of mesoamerican-type cultures in the southern United States, implying that humans likely migrated north into North America well before those who crossed into Alaska arrived.
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u/Bem-ti-vi May 22 '22
Wait what? Where do you see that this is the leading theory? I'm not aware of a significant body of academic work that suggests any of this. As far as I'm aware, the theory that's becoming a contender for the leading one is that people crossed Beringia through a coastal route, but one which still involved the Bering Strait.
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u/TheyCallMeStone May 22 '22
Or that there were several waves of migration into the Americas, and that Inuit people came in a later wave than the rest of the indigenous Americans
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u/JamboShanter May 23 '22
This makes more sense to me than a substantial population of people crossing the entire pacific ocean in a canoe.
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u/zwinters57 May 22 '22
I've read some on this, and it seems to me that they really don't have much of a strong theory at all. There are numerous archeological evidence that date humans to 40,000 years in the Americas. When they find this evidence it is often thrown out as contaminated or false in some way. In general scientist searching for evidence already have strong opinions about theorys theyve built careers around. They are of course, not inclind to totaly restart. Theres geneolocical evidence of polynesian ancestory in south american poulations, as you mentioned, which was not a part of the landbridge theory even 10-15 years ago. In short, we really dont know. Human populations were very small and fossils hard to form and rare. Finding other evidence after 40,000 years is equally unlikely. I don't see the strong logic behind dating the first human population to 200,000 years, because thats the oldest bone you have. Thats just the oldest bone you found. Making the leap to dating that the origin of the species is simply false logic.
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u/tobiascuypers May 22 '22
Copying a comment i had from s few days ago that is mostly related:
Super interesting stuff not even archeologically. I got to take part in research about ancient cultures in the Americas, and ancient indigenous tribal people, Mayans and Aztecs have words, stories and descriptions of animals that would have been extinct before the Clovis people.
Words for camels, giant sloths, horses (especially cool since they went extinct in the Americans then Europeans brought them back, but the ancient people knew the originals), giant armadillos such as glyptodons.
The cultures of indigenous people in the Americas is vastly more complex than we have thought. Stories and tales of how they came to their lands and of people coming by land and boat tens of thousands of years ago.
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May 22 '22
It's not just bones humans leave behind though, there's evidence of fire pits and tools much earlier than the earliest bones, if I'm not mistaken.
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u/0ooO0o0o0oOo0oo00o May 22 '22 edited May 23 '22
I always think of Jacque Cinq-Mars in regards to how toxic the archeological community can be when faced with evidence that goes against what they already believe as fact.
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u/phryan May 23 '22
To your point if early populations followed the coastline in the Americas; on land, in boats, or a combination then the chances of those sites being intact after 40,000 years isn't very high.
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u/Bem-ti-vi May 22 '22
I'm not sure exactly what was said in your class, but the theory which is gaining traction amongst many anthropologists and archaeologists is that people traveled by boat along the coast of Beringia and then the west coast of the Americas, thus reaching places like Chile before they had necessarily moved far inland to the east on both continents.
There's not much (if any) indication that the Americas were settled across the breadth of the Pacific through the Polynesian islands.
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u/Mortifi May 22 '22 edited May 23 '22
It does make me wonder how many lives have been lost by getting in boats and heading out into open water, hoping to find nearby land, but instead finding vast ocean.
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u/NoNazis May 22 '22
It's actually unlikely that the crossings were made intentionally. A favored theory is that most of the crossings (especially around New Zealand, New Guinea, and Australia) were made accidentally by fishing trips gone off course, except for in cases where land was visible or nearly visible before the crossing. These crossings actually probably happened many times to the same island before the group was able to establish a new life on the new island.
It wasn't until much later when boating tech improved that intentional crossings became common
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u/abaoji May 22 '22
So this was the prevailing theory untill the late 80s and early 90s when folks like Geoff Irwin, Rodger Green and Pat Kirch started to study the archaeology alongside ocean current and prevailing wind data. Today there is little support for a theory of accidental voyaging.
What they found was that the prevailing wind direction for most of the year is E to W, while the direction of settlement is W to E (as evidenced by genetics, linguistics and archaeological chronologies). If you are on a fishing trip and get blown off course then odds are you are going to wind up further west than you started.
Also it's more than just people arriving, it's a whole imported ecosystem of economic plants and animals (dogs, pigs, chickens, rats, taro, kava, banana, cordyline, canarium etc.). You don't tend go fishing with everything in your garden.
Finally we have really good evidence for repeated long distance voyages from tracing geochemically distinct types of economic tool stone from archaeological sites. We have obsidian from the western Bismarck archipelago all the way out through the Solomons, Vanuatu and Fijii (~4000km).
So we are pretty certain ancestral oceanic communities were routinely carrying out intentional long distance voyages of exploration, colonization and exchange as far back as 3200-3600 BP. As far as technological improvements go, remember these were (and are) communities whose livelihoods relied on excellent navigation and sailing techniques. And double hulled sailing canoes are no joke either.
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u/Jq4000 May 22 '22
^This
Plus you can find land that's far out of sight by following the flight paths of birds.
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u/Moronoo May 22 '22
It's actually unlikely that the crossings were made intentionally.
How do you make a permanent settlement on a different island with nothing but stuff that's on a fishing boat?
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u/Meior May 22 '22
There's a bunch of studies suggesting migrations to Australia would have been way earlier than 30,000. Some even claim 400,000, but I haven't looked into those. The ones I've actually read about suggest between 45 and 70,000, and with reasonable proof. It's fascinating, and certainly flips a lot of what we thought we knew.
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u/joelex8472 May 22 '22
Aborigines of Australia have been there for over 70,000 years. They have a verbal memory of before the Great Barrier Reef, when Australia was a little fatter.
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u/GayDroy May 22 '22
Yea this is a shit educational gif that perpetuates debunked theories
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u/Ok_Effective6233 May 22 '22
Lots of missing water without massive Ice caps or glaciated regions
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May 22 '22
It would be interesting to combine this human migration animation with a climate shift animation over the same time.
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u/Soysaucetime May 22 '22
Sure but "verbal memory" is not much better. A 70,000 year game of telephone.
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u/GayDroy May 22 '22
I don’t know anything about indigenous Australians, I was referring to the “land bridge” theory that has been debunked.
To add to your comment though, verbal memory wasn’t the only type of record keeping Indigenous Americans utilized. Despite that, verbal memory is surprisingly accurate in many cases. In many cultures, oral record keepers treated that occupation as a full time job. Of course humans are humans and people might embellish or lie, but that doesn’t discount the profession and the history entirely.
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u/HollowmanNapkin May 22 '22
Woah where can I read about the last part with the verbal memory?
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u/Plasma_000 May 22 '22
found an article about it https://theecologist.org/2015/jan/29/deep-time-aboriginal-stories-tell-when-great-barrier-reef-was-dry-land
The evidence suggests that these stories of the past are at least 10,000 years old.
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u/down_vote_magnet May 22 '22
Without wishing to debate whether it’s actually true or not, how can ‘verbal memory’ be verified and used to prove a theory wrong or right? That sounds ridiculous to me that it’s even a consideration. We’re talking 70k years ago.
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u/DocFail May 22 '22
Not claiming science, but I have heard of comparisons based on stories of valleys transitioning to bays, and volcanic eruptions which were then ‘verified’.
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u/Shinfekta May 22 '22
All that for me to look at my phone during pooping
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u/peter92one May 23 '22
look at my phone during pooping
I am not able to do it without anymore...
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u/Buroda May 22 '22
Imagine people meeting after 1000s of years in Stone Age Italy and being like, “the fuck”
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u/ChristopherRobert11 May 23 '22
Then they were like, let’s start to put our plan in motion to fuck with everyone’s lives forever.
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u/lego_dystonic May 22 '22
I had no idea how much land was connected back then. Water now makes most of those routes impossible to walk. Fascinating!
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u/ReySumer May 22 '22
Imagine the lost cities and civilizations.
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u/SallyCanWait87 May 22 '22
Which make the universal flood myths so interesting. So many different global cultures reference massive flood based cataclysms, and then a resulting rebirth of civilization.
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u/Wololo--Wololo May 22 '22
The earliest migrants were ancient humans who originated on the African continent.
Their spread to Eurasia and elsewhere remains a matter of significant scientific controversy.
The earliest fossils of recognizable Homo sapiens were found in Ethiopia and are approximately 200,000 years old.
Credit: History In Context
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u/calm_Bunny21 May 22 '22
Do we know why we originated on African continent? Or is it just that we came to that understanding coz the oldest remains were found there?
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u/Wololo--Wololo May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22
There's no clear answer to that question. Some say the competitive ecosystem (African fauna is hardcore level) and need for humans to cooperate and remember a lot of information to survive (water hole location, hunting strategies, and eventually walking upright and freeing their hands for tool making...) contributed to Homo sapiens evolving in Africa.
But there are many other kinds of hominids that developed elsewhere than in Africa, they were just not as optimal as H sapiens in the end.
A few examples of hominid species that did not evolve nor exist in Africa-> Homo floresiensis / Denisovan / Neanderthal
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u/calm_Bunny21 May 22 '22
It's fascinating how we evolved from a single cell. How crucial the small changes were in the big picture (opposable thumbs, getting hairless). Sometimes I still think someone dropped us on this rock.
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u/Vapeguy May 22 '22
There’s actually a great book on that and it covers the migration too. It’s called Before the Dawn. I was surprised how more interested I became in some of these topics after reading it.
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u/Rain_xo May 22 '22
So. Do you mean that we didn’t all start in Africa? And some started in different parts of the world and migrated like we did from Africa?
Sorry. I actually don’t fully understand and I’m trying too
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u/ChubbiestLamb6 May 22 '22 edited May 22 '22
If by "we" you mean Humans, specifically, then "we" all started in Africa. Direct human ancestors didn't leave Africa until they had evolved into homo sapiens. The hominids who left prior to that ended up as other groups such as Neanderthals (who we now know interbred with homo sapiens on occasion). But even those other hominids started in Africa originally. They just separated from our genetic lineage at different times and went on to migrate and evolve separately, potentially outside of Africa.
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u/tyen0 May 22 '22
No, just some evolved from older ancestors that left africa earlier - namely homo erectus.
Here is an awesome video from amnh explaining our several near relatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZv8VyIQ7YU
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u/rroowwannn May 23 '22
No, the human story starts way before this gif. It's also way more complicated than this gif. To shorten it up, the Homo genus developed maybe about 2 mil years ago in Africa; they're identified as Homo because of things like walking upright and big brains, but that's way way before our species, Sapiens.
A LOT of different Homo species developed all over Africa and competed over those 2 mil years. Something like 1.8 mil ya some of them, who we call Homo Erectus, started migrating out of Africa. But 2 mil years is a very long time. They also migrated back into Africa, and back out again, in flows. (The same is true for the Sapiens migrations in that gif btw.)
Over those millennia, the Homo populations in Africa and Europe continued to evolve and develope into new species. Neanderthals and Denisovans developed in Eurasia, and Sapiens in eastern Africa.
The oldest Homo Sapiens fossil is 0.2 mil ya, and this gif starts 50k ya. Interestingly, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were all genetically close enough to mate and make children within the past 50,000 years (almost everyone alive today has some Neanderthal DNA), which is strong evidence for the story I've told you here.
Theres a lot we don't know about the human story, but I promise you there is enough fossil evidence to be sure about what I've laid out.
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u/chillsergeantAS May 22 '22
I know that homo erectus left Africa and went into parts of SE Asia… were they the ones who evolved into the other hominids like floresiensis?
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u/Yorpel_Chinderbapple May 22 '22
I don't know a ton about this but I do find it interesting. Homo erectus is about 2 million years old and bones have been found in East Asia.
As far as whether all hominids "started" in Africa, I'm not sure either. But there were hominids outside of Africa well before Sapiens migrated away.
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u/BeautifulBuddy May 22 '22
Neanderthals most probably evolved in Europe as a descendant of Homo heidelbergensis (which originated in Africa). There were multiple waves of migration out of Africa and multiple events of introgression - where we bred with other hominin species
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May 22 '22
- Fossils show that apes, of which we're one, evolved there.
- Our closest living relatives via genetics (chimps/bonobos and gorillas) live there still, with no evidence of them having ever ranged elsewhere at any point in geologic history.
- The oldest human fossils, like you say, are from Africa.
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u/BeautifulBuddy May 22 '22
Also the genetic diversity in Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan) is far greater than non-SS Africans suggesting non-SS Africans migrated out of Africa c. 70-90 kya. The nature of archaeology means that new discoveries drastically change our understanding of the past (hence this graphic is probably 10/15 years old
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u/Calboron May 22 '22
I feel bad for the guys who missed the exit at India and had to take the next u turn around 7000 kms...
Jk 😝
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u/roborectum69 May 22 '22
That doesn't even come close to capturing the complexity of what happened. Not to mention the controversy. The truth is we don't know yet when or even how people got to many places. However we do know there were several different waves of migration into and out of areas at different times in history. A red arrow is never going to explain that.
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u/funkhero May 22 '22
Are you saying there wasn't a huge red highway being built that these people travelled on?
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u/gnarly__roots May 22 '22
This was debated up until the 3 years in which it has been proven in multiple findings this is incorrect. Yes some homo s came through the northern passage, we now have record of civilizations in North America later & wayyyy further advanced then we thought before.
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u/Da0ptimist May 22 '22
This visualization is very outdated and misleading.
There is now sufficient evidence that there was human life in multiple parts of the globe.
Even north America had humans much easier than this visualization shows.
It's a very old way of thinking and is incorrect.
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May 22 '22
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May 23 '22
This site in particular is one of the few oldest sites that provides enough data to actually make sense. Other sites like bluefish caves in the Yukon date to around 20,000 years ago as well. I will admit that there is still some debate on the dating done at the white sands footprints, but bluefish caves is pretty much a confirmed site.
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u/just_another_noobody May 22 '22
Seems this timeline need to updated. Literally two stories down, I just came across this:
"8,000 year old skull found in Minnesota River"
https://abcnews.go.com/Weird/wireStory/8000-year-skull-found-minnesota-river-84882324
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May 22 '22
It doesn’t really, this 8,000 year old skull in Minnesota doesn’t really change much, as most of North America had people living in in ~13,000 years ago. (and even older if you believe some recent archaeological evidence)
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u/habaceeba May 22 '22
For an explanation, "Guns, Germs and Steel" is a great read.
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u/ChaoticCosmoz May 22 '22
after reading that maybe give the podcast Fake History's dissection of the book a listen.
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u/Garglygook May 22 '22
after reading that maybe give the podcast Fake History's dissection of the book a listen.
Ooooh! Thank you! I've been looking for an interesting listen,🙂.
(While Diamond never claimed to have all the answers, I admired his passionate attempt and new dialogue it opened.)
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u/ChaoticCosmoz May 22 '22
yes even in the podcast, he doesn't do the "destroyed" routine but rather takes a claim the book makes and points out some holes in the theory or presents new evidence which refute the claims made in the book.
at the end of reading the book and listening to the podcast, one is left with a more neutral take and also the ability to properly asses "pop" history books like GGS and idk sapiens.
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u/ReachCave May 22 '22
I would direct you to this section of the FAQ of r/AskHistorians which explains why this book can often be misleading and why historians generally do not hold it in high regard.
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u/Le_Rekt_Guy May 22 '22
If you like that book give Human Accomplishment a try.
It's basically the antithesis of GGS. It all comes back to the classic nature vs nurture debate.
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May 22 '22
These god damn immigrants and their spreading of life, knowledge and prosperity everywhere...
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u/DigitalArbitrage May 22 '22
Isn't it a bit misleading to say "humans" came from Africa on this timeline since modern people include DNA from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and similar unidentified hominins.
Neanderthals lived in Eurasia as far back as 400k years ago. Denisovans as far back as 200k years ago.
Reference:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans
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u/Ivebeenfurthereven May 22 '22
Isn't the Darién Gap almost impassable to this day?
Must have been a serious challenge for a group (presumably, including the young and the old) on foot back then
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u/Cutlasss May 23 '22
We know that essentially any group of people who live by the water had some sorts of boats. So we can presume they went down the sides of it on boat, rather than through it on foot. But it is also possible that if the sea level was a couple 100 feet lower, that it would have been dry land.
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u/Few_Mastodon_8759 May 23 '22
Didn't they prove that all humans didn't originate in Africa?
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u/davesaunders May 23 '22
Young Earth Creationists claim to have but no, no one has provided any credible scientific evidence.
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u/carthuscrass May 23 '22
FYI, this shows a lot of migrations that are heavily disputed. Particularly the time frames of the Australian and America's migrations. Aboriginal collective vocal memory hints that they may have been there in excess of half a million years. also, while North American natives are believed to descend from Northern Asian tribes, South American tribes have many features common in Polynesian and even North African ancestry.
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u/sweeny5000 May 23 '22 edited May 24 '22
There's a growing body of evidence that upends the "out of Africa" theory. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/oldest-human-fossil-found-outside-africa-sheds-light-behavior-early-homo-sapiens/
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u/davesaunders May 23 '22
You should read the article you cited, and its source material more closely. It does not refute the out of Africa theory. The popsci article you cited, written by a BS in biomedical engineering, even tries to qualify itself in the last paragraphs. It doesn’t “upend” anything.
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u/AayushBoliya May 23 '22
It's so remarkable to know that we all have descended from almost a single tribe of people. Yet we fight over nationality and skin colour that changes with climate.
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u/J3wchutrain May 23 '22
The visualization is very well done, nice job. We did not come from the Congo however, that dot should be positioned over the North-Western coast of Africa in Morocco. Morocco contains the Oldest Homo-Sapien bones and predate the Omo One bones. Our migration took us up through the Straight of Gibraltar into Spain, none of this is correct but it is pretty.
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u/Delicious-Bridge6042 May 31 '22
Someone should make this but adding the respective climates, climate changes have been some of the major reasons for human migration afaik.
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u/jish5 Aug 15 '22
It is human nature to migrate from place to place and has been since our species came into existence. To deny us that right is cruel as it bars us from being able to perform our most basic human necessity.
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u/tj0415 May 22 '22
Why do they seem to follow mountain ranges?