Survival

For almost 300,000 years, humans were African. But whereas our previous human cousins had already made their way into Eurasia, our own species was more than 200,000 years confined to the mother continent. Then, around 50,000 years ago, came the revolution. There was a great migratory surge — and it held. As opposed to previous failed forays into the broader world, this migration sowed all modern non-African peoples living today. One question plagued scientists for a long time: why this wave? What gave this effort success when so many others had been unsuccessful? Now, a revolutionary new international study in Nature might have solved the puzzle — not through identifying tools or mutations, but by mapping how our forebears dominated