Origins — An Atlas of Human Origins

About this atlas

Origins is a comparative, deep-time atlas of how modern humans settled and adapted to six continents. Rather than treating each continent as one undivided block, every region is split into geographically and culturally coherent subregions — the Nile Valley and the Maghreb rather than one “Africa,” Beringia and Mesoamerica rather than one “North America” — so the same six lenses (Environment, Migration, Culture, Diet, Genetics, plus an Overview) can be compared side by side across very different landscapes and populations.

Every dated claim on this site is drawn from a real, peer-reviewed source, listed in that page’s References panel. Nothing here is invented or approximated beyond what the cited literature itself reports — contested or wide-uncertainty dates are shown as ranges, not false precision.

How to read it: start at the world map and scrub the timeline to watch regions settle in sequence, or jump straight into a region to explore its subregions. Inside a subregion, each tab holds its own cited facts, ancient-genome snapshots, and a shared deep-time chart, so you can see how one lens — diet, say — connects to another, like genetics, for that same population.

Unfamiliar term? Check the Glossary in the header.

Glossary

Recurring technical terms used throughout this atlas, defined in plain language.

Admixture: Gene flow between previously separated populations, leaving a measurable trace of one population's ancestry in another's genome.
aDNA (ancient DNA): DNA recovered directly from ancient remains — bone, teeth, or sediment — rather than inferred from living people.
Archaic hominin: A member of an earlier or side-branch human lineage — Neanderthals and Denisovans, for instance — distinct from anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
Back-migration: A later movement of people returning toward a region their ancestors had earlier left, mixing new ancestry back into the source population.
BP (before present): A dating convention counting years backward from 1950, the reference point fixed by early radiocarbon dating.
Bottleneck: A sharp, temporary drop in population size that reduces genetic diversity, leaving a lasting signature in descendants' DNA.
Cline: A gradual change in a trait or gene frequency across geographic distance, rather than a sharp boundary between populations.
Denisovan: An archaic human population, known mainly from DNA and a handful of fossils in Siberia and Asia, that interbred with the ancestors of some modern populations, especially in Oceania.
EDAR: A gene variant common in East Asian and Indigenous American populations that affects hair thickness, tooth shape, and sweat gland density — a well-studied example of recent human adaptation.
Founder effect: Reduced genetic diversity in a population descended from a small number of original colonizing individuals.
Haplogroup: A group of related DNA sequences (commonly on mitochondrial DNA or the Y chromosome) that share a common ancestor and a distinctive mutation pattern, used to trace lines of descent.
Hypoxia adaptation: Biological adjustment to low-oxygen environments, most studied in high-altitude Andean, Tibetan, and Ethiopian populations.
ka / ma: Shorthand for thousand years (ka, kilo-annum) and million years (ma, mega-annum) before present, used throughout this atlas for dates.
Lactase persistence: The genetic trait allowing adults to digest lactose in milk, which arose independently in several pastoralist populations after the spread of dairying.
LGM (Last Glacial Maximum): The peak of the most recent ice age, roughly 26,000–19,000 years ago, when ice sheets were at their largest extent and many regions became colder and drier.
Megafauna: Very large animal species — mammoths, giant ground sloths, and similar — many of which went extinct near the end of the last ice age, reshaping the diets of the humans who hunted them.
Microlith: A small, finely worked stone tool, often hafted in combination with others, marking a shift toward more complex composite technology.
mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA): DNA passed down almost exclusively through the maternal line, used to trace deep female lines of ancestry and migration.
Neanderthal: An archaic human population native to Europe and western Asia that interbred with the ancestors of modern non-African populations before going extinct roughly 40,000 years ago.
Out of Africa: The dispersal of anatomically modern humans from Africa into the rest of the world, beginning by at least ~60,000 years ago and the shared starting point for every region's migration story on this atlas.
Phenotype: An organism's observable traits — skin pigmentation, body build, disease resistance — produced by the interaction of genotype and environment.
Stable isotope analysis: A method of reading the chemical signatures preserved in bone or tooth enamel to reconstruct an individual's diet, climate, or the region where they grew up.
Y-chromosome DNA: DNA passed down almost exclusively through the paternal line, used alongside mtDNA to trace deep male lines of ancestry and migration.