Book Previews Diaspora & Origins

The story of the human species begins in Africa 300,000 years ago. Migrations moved humanity around that continent 170 – 130 thousand years ago. Sixty to eighty thousand years later humankind advanced beyond the land of its origin. Green corridors and land bridges opened as the climate changed and our species moved through these access ways into new homelands.

An initial exploratory wave clung to the southern coastline of Asia to exploit its intertidal abundance of food, developing sophisticated maritime technology that enabled people to get all the way to Australia and into Melanesia. Another group moved inland through Iraq and spread north into Europe and east into Asia.

Step by step humans found their way to every habitable land mass on our planet, ending the discovery phase at New Zealand less than a thousand years ago. On leaving Africa we encountered other hominid species that migrated out of Africa before us, assimilating them through interbreeding (Homo denisova and Homo neanderthalensis) and/or out-competing them to extinction. Clues of our passage can be read in the records of archeology, food transportation, linguistics, cultural practice. Migratory patterns are also stamped into our DNA.

The metascapes in this book are a collection of these patterns, designed to give the reader a sense of how intrinsic migration has been for our species.