HUMAN EVOLUTION

The First Departure

~2.1 to 1.8 million years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Gelasian

Long before our own species existed, hominins walked out of Africa and across Asia. The best-dated travellers, at Dmanisi in the Caucasus, were small in body and small in brain, and shared their landscape with sabre-toothed cats and giant hyenas. Older still, on the Chinese Loess Plateau, seventeen layers of stone tools run from 2.1 million years upward, with no bones to say who left them.

Why it matters

Leaving Africa needed neither a large brain nor a modern body, only legs and a tolerance for open grassland. Whoever made the Chinese tools was there three hundred thousand years before the oldest skeleton anyone can point to outside Africa, which means the first departure is older than the first traveller we can name.

Dating & uncertaintyDisputed

Bones and tools at Dmanisi in Georgia give a firm 1.8 million years. Stone tools alone, from the Chinese Loess Plateau, push the date to 2.1 million, and there is no skeleton to say who made them. Whether the first traveller was already Homo erectus is therefore open.

Sources

1. Zhu et al. (2018), Nature · Hominin occupation of the Chinese Loess Plateau since about 2.1 million years ago
2. Scardia et al. (2021), Evolutionary Anthropology · What kind of hominin first left Africa?
3. Palmqvist et al. (2022), L'Anthropologie · On the ecological scenario of the first hominin dispersal out of Africa

Earth history as one day

23:59:2040.0 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day