When We Arrived
From Homo erectus to modern man, our ancient ancestors took eons to arrive on the scene
Around 90,000 years ago, modern humans appeared in the Near East. They weren’t the first humans to make this journey, and as they moved north and west, they encountered earlier immigrants. In some places, the newcomers settled right next to their archaic cousins, living in close proximity for tens of thousands of years. Then suddenly, around 30,000 years ago, the older humans disappeared. Modern humans went on to populate the entire world.
This brief summary seems straightforward, but almost every phrase is contested by one group of paleoanthropologists or another. Despite more than a hundred years of research, there’s no agreement about why our Paleolithic ancestors left Africa, where they went, or even who they were.a
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