human migration

New techniques have shown that people reached the New World far earlier than the long-standing estimate of 13,000 years ago, but scientists still debate exactly when humans arrived on the continent—and how.

Diverse lines of evidence point to humans’ presence in the New World long before the dawn of Clovis culture. But rewriting this chapter of human history raises many questions about how these early people came to inhabit these continents.

The oldest DNA yet isolated from humans in Africa reveals long-range migrations around 50,000 years ago, which likely played a role in the Middle to Later Stone Age transition.

Researchers excavated human footprints out of a small bluff next to a dried-up playa lake and radiocarbon-dated embedded seeds to around 23,000 years ago. Their results suggest that people entered the Americas thousands of years earlier than the accepted estimate.

Analysis of DNA from remains found in an Indonesian cave provides new insight into human movements among the islands between East Asia and Australia.

The study is the first to show a genomic relationship between dogs and humans on the move.

While questions still outnumber answers, new findings from archaeology, genetics, and other disciplines are revealing surprising insights into the early cultures of the most recently populated continent.

Genetics and archaeology yield clues as to when humans first arrived on the continent and how these early settlers lived.

Genetic evidence points to individuals from South America having possibly floated on a raft to Polynesian islands about 500 years before Europeans navigated there.

A tooth and six bone fragments are the oldest confirmed Homo sapiens fossils in Europe.

The crania of individuals who lived in the Yucatán Peninsula during the late Pleistocene show a high degree of anatomical diversity among them, and their skull shapes differ from that of other North American populations of the time.

A museum sample of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian crop plant yields genomic information that helps researchers track the plant’s domestication and migration.

Dating back to 16,000 years, items from a dig site in Idaho point to the first settlers arriving by a Pacific coastal route rather than by an ice-free land bridge from Siberia.

Sequences from dozens of ancient remains from Siberia reveal the closest ancient relative of Native Americans found outside of North America.

The dating of stone tools in China puts members of the Homo genus there more than 2 million years ago.

European settlers likely wiped out these ancient dogs, but the animals seem to have left a lasting legacy in a transmissible canine cancer.

Divergent human lineages of North America intermingled before setting off to establish populations of Central and South America.  

An 88,000-year-old finger bone places human ancestors in Arabia earlier than previously believed.

Researchers find that modern human populations carry distinct sets of genes from the extinct hominin species.