In light of the recent results in human evolutionary history some readers have appealed to me to create some sort of clearer infographic. There’s a lot to juggle in your head when it comes to the new models and the errors and uncertainties in estimates derived from statistical inference. Words are not always optimal, and there’s often something left out.
So I spent a few hours creating a series of maps which distill my own best guess as to what occurred over the past 100,000 years. I want to emphasize that this purely my own interpretation, based on what I know. This is naturally going to be biased (I don’t know as much about uniparental lineages as some of my readers, and have a weak grasp of a lot of morphological changes, etc.). But it is a place to start. I’ve put the maps into a slideshow. Please observe that in brackets I’ve put qualifies such as “high”, “medium” and “low” in regards to my assertions. That shows you how confident I am about a given assertion. I’m 100% sure that I’m wrong in a lot of the details here, but this is my best guess as to the shape of things over the past 100,000 years. Feel free to ask more in the comments. Also, take the dates with a little fudge room. If I used exact precise dates for everything there would be too many slides.
Note: You can’t see the slideshow in the RSS browser.