Out of Africa
The dispersal that sticks — every non-African alive today descends from this one population.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 10 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 5 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Between roughly 70,000 and 60,000 years ago a population of modern humans leaves Africa and does not die out. Genetic evidence is unambiguous that essentially all non-African ancestry traces to this single expansion: non-African populations carry a subset of African genetic diversity, the founder group was small, and the further from Africa a population lives the less diverse it is. Within about 20,000 years their descendants reach Australia, Europe and Siberia.