Arrival· Where Sapiens lives
Southwest Asia
50 ka
The expansion that peopled the world passes through Southwest Asia and does not turn back.
What the evidence shows
Three male lineages survive from this departure and no more: haplogroup D, rare; C, moderately rare; and FT, which now dominates almost every population outside Africa. Their shared ancestor is dated between 55,000 and 50,000 years ago, and the phylogeography points to East or Southeast Asia rather than to a source near Africa, which a simple expansion model would have predicted. Everyone outside Africa also carries about 2% Neanderthal DNA from this same episode. The narrowness of that inheritance is the measure of the crossing: a whole world descends from a very small number of lineages.
Dating & uncertainty
The genomes of living people outside Africa descend almost entirely from this one expansion. Earlier people were there and left no descendants among us.
Sources
- Hallast et al. (2020), Human Genetics · A Southeast Asian origin for present-day non-African human Y chromosomes
- Sümer et al. (2024), Nature · Earliest modern human genomes constrain timing of Neanderthal admixture
- Bergström et al. (2021), Nature · Origins of modern human ancestry
- Stringer & Galway-Witham (2018), Science · When did modern humans leave Africa?