Population regime· The columns of time

Foragers worldwide

65 ka → 11.7 ka

Foragers reach Eurasia, Sahul, then the Americas. By 10,000 BCE the world holds a few million people (HYDE 3.2: ~4.4 million).

What the evidence shows

In the 53,000 years of this band the species goes from one continent to five, and the curve of its numbers stays almost flat while it does so. The HYDE reconstruction puts about 4.4 million people on Earth at 10,000 BCE, after the whole dispersal is complete: fewer than live in one large city today. Spreading and multiplying are separate things, and this band is where they come apart. What changes here is the map, not the total.

Bounds and conventions

The expansion that most non-African ancestry descends from is dated ~70 to 50 ka; the 65 ka bound follows the earliest (and debated) Sahul dates. Population estimates before the Holocene are orders of magnitude, not counts: HYDE brackets its own 4.4 million with a range running from under ten thousand to nearly nine million.

Sources

1. Hallast, P., Agdzhoyan, A., Balanovsky, O., Xue, Y., Tyler-Smith, C. (2020). A Southeast Asian origin for present-day non-African human Y chromosomes. Human Genetics 140, 299–307.
2. Clarkson, C., Jacobs, Z., Marwick, B., et al. (2017). Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. Nature 547, 306–310.
3. O'Connell, J. F., Allen, J., Williams, M. A. J., et al. (2018). When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul? PNAS 115(34), 8482–8490.
4. Klein Goldewijk, K., Beusen, A., Doelman, J., Stehfest, E. (2017). Anthropogenic land use estimates for the Holocene : HYDE 3.2. Earth System Science Data 9, 927–953. Jeu de données versionné, consulté le 2026-08-28.