Here's an amazing (to me) animation of human migrations over the last 160,000 years. I knew the general outlines, but these details are very interesting:
What is absolutely astonishing to me, and probably shouldn't be, is that both North and South American were inhabited before human beings reached the British Isles. I tend to think of England as the repository of ancient history, part of The Old World, whereas the cultures in the Western Hemisphere were more ancient by far.
That's quite strongly debated - the earliest date is usually about 1000 years ago (something to do with a type of rat that lives here that got here somehow at that time) and the most recent is about 400 or 500 years, I think.
Either way, NZ was really one of the last places in the world to be settled, probably due to the distance and the fact that it broke away from the original land mass quite soon (which is why we have almost no native mammals).
But looking at that animation, it's amazing to see how far the human race has come and how much we've managed to survive. Say what you like about us, we're a tenacious lot!
I didn't know either of those, or that people from sub-Saharan African had a different common ancestor from everyone else. Somehow I'm thinking that the !Xung (sp?) may be the real descendants of that branch, and that most Africans nowadays come from a later migration from people who originally went north and east (though that's not what the write-up suggested). I know there were huge Bantu migrations in historical times.
I think I saw a TV program on public TV which supported your idea that the bushmen and the like were the original stock and that the Bantu among others were decendents later in the family human tree.
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What is absolutely astonishing to me, and probably shouldn't be, is that both North and South American were inhabited before human beings reached the British Isles. I tend to think of England as the repository of ancient history, part of The Old World, whereas the cultures in the Western Hemisphere were more ancient by far.
Fascinating...
;o)
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Either way, NZ was really one of the last places in the world to be settled, probably due to the distance and the fact that it broke away from the original land mass quite soon (which is why we have almost no native mammals).
But looking at that animation, it's amazing to see how far the human race has come and how much we've managed to survive. Say what you like about us, we're a tenacious lot!
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