A Shifting Climate Gave Humans Many Opportunities to Leave Africa

A new paleoclimate model finds many favorable windows when Homo sapiens might have survived a migration out of Africa.

Until recently, scientists believed modern humans left Africa in one enormous exodus around 60,000 years ago. But a new climate model suggests that modern humans had several windows of opportunity to leave the continent far earlier. The research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, reconstructed the climate of northeastern Africa over the last 300,000 years. The scientists identified when there would have been enough rainfall to allow a group of hunter-gatherers to survive the journey to the Arabian Peninsula. Archaeological and genetic data still support the idea that all non-African people descended from a single migration that left the continent between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago. But the new paper bolsters the theory that Homo sapiens had multiple migrations out of Africa.