Human Journey

The Greatest Journey

The genes of people today tell of our ancestors' trek out of Africa to the far corners of the globe.

By James Shreeve
Photograph by Raghubir Singh

Everyone cherishes a decent story, and when its done, this will be the best one ever told. It starts in Africa with a gathering of seeker gatherers, maybe simply a couple of hundred in number. It closes approximately after 200,000 years with their six and an a large portion of billion relatives spread over the Earth, living in peace or at war, having confidence in a thousand separate gods or none whatsoever, their countenances aglow in the light of open air fires and PC screens.

In the middle of is a sprawling adventure of survival, development, segregation, and success, a large portion of it unfolding in the quiet of ancient times. Who were those first advanced individuals in Africa? What urged a band of their relatives to leave their home landmass as meager as 50,000 years prior and venture into Eurasia? What courses did they take? Did they interbreed with prior individuals from the human family along the way? At the point when and how did people first achieve the Americas?