Why didn't all homo sapiens migrate from Africa long, long ago?

[Mr Rayon]

Why did some stay in Africa?

 

Why did the rest leave?

[dimreepr]

Why did “Darwin’s finches” have different beaks?

[Phi for All]

Why did some stay in Africa?

 

Why did the rest leave?

 

Some were lazy. These were the ones who kept posting science subjects in the Lounge for staff to move. They were most likely all beaten to death.

[Strange]

Why did some stay in Africa?

 

Why did the rest leave?

 

People are Strange.

[swansont]

 

People are Strange.

 

 

 

When you're a stranger.

[Delta1212]

 

 

 

When you're a stranger.

In a strange land.

[Strange]

When the land gets strange, the strange get going.

[Sensei]

Why did some stay in Africa?

 

Why did the rest leave?

You rather meant why some leaved Africa, and the rest stayed,

as the most of people stayed in Africa,

while amount of people leaving Africa was very small..

 

The same can be asked why some fly to f.e. London while the majority remain here.

They are searching for new better life.

 

Africa has very small direct connection to other continents (Sinai Peninsula).

[CharonY]

Also note that it is not that people packed up and just left. The migration should rather be seen as an expansion of territory utilized by humans.

[overtone]

One would assume that Africa was a very nice place to live, and after a million years of evolution humans were well adapted to comfortable and prosperous lives there.

 

Maybe the ones who left were rejects and outcasts and other losers.

 

Alternatively, something like the culling that takes place on certain South Sea Islands was happening - where the elders know how many people a given island can support, and when the population gets too big it is formally and ritually split, with a large number of people getting into boats and taking off for parts unknown.

 

And of course there are the inevitable teenagers running off, leaving town for adventure.

[Delta1212]

Also note that it is not that people packed up and just left. The migration should rather be seen as an expansion of territory utilized by humans.

I think it's important to do away with the image of humans making a trek out if Africa as some kind of goal. It may have taken several generations for a group of humans to move a distance that could have been covered in a single human lifetime if there had been a dedicated and intentional migration.

 

We have to bear in mind that really fixed settlements didn't started cropping up until the rise of agriculture, which hadn't happened yet, and that to some extent, humans needed to move around a bit to stay where the food was.

 

It's likely that whatever group of humans left did so while looking for nearby unexploited food sources and that this drew them out into new territory gradually over quite a bit of time.

[swansont]

I think it's important to do away with the image of humans making a trek out if Africa as some kind of goal. It may have taken several generations for a group of humans to move a distance that could have been covered in a single human lifetime if there had been a dedicated and intentional migration.

 

We have to bear in mind that really fixed settlements didn't started cropping up until the rise of agriculture, which hadn't happened yet, and that to some extent, humans needed to move around a bit to stay where the food was.

 

It's likely that whatever group of humans left did so while looking for nearby unexploited food sources and that this drew them out into new territory gradually over quite a bit of time.

 

 

And if they had depleted the local supply sufficiently, they would tend to move in the same direction, rather than reverse course and go to a place they had recently vacated, since they had depleted the food supply there, too.

[Moontanman]

People look ugly when you're alone...

Edited April 4, 2016 by Moontanman

[CharonY]

I think it's important to do away with the image of humans making a trek out if Africa as some kind of goal. It may have taken several generations for a group of humans to move a distance that could have been covered in a single human lifetime if there had been a dedicated and intentional migration.

While it is not possible to track individual migrations, the time scale appears to be tens of thousands of years. I.e. the dispersal happened in time scales much longer than our entire recorded history.

[Strange]

This sounds similar to the way that agriculture (and maybe Indo-European languages) may have spread into Europe. Rather than migrants bringing the new techniques with them in some sort of invasion it appears to have been a gradual process where the children of farmers moved on a bit and set up a bit further east. Then their descendants did the same, and so on.