early migration routes

Unlike more modern migrants, whose journey is defined by a target destination and a well-trodden route, the first migrants had no idea where they were going or the hazards they would face.

It is important to remember that many millions of years ago, when the initial emigration was taking place, the geography of the Earth was very different to what it is now. There was one continental land mass, called Pangaea which facilitated migration west towards what is now South America and east towards what is now India and Australia.

After the cataclysmic events that split Pangaea into our present continents, the most amazing isolation of all species took place. North and South America - and Australia - remained unknown continents, with unknown people, and unknown civilizations until relatively recent times.

Africa remained the centre of the human universe, but now the migratory routes had to follow coastlines and mountain ranges. The region between the western Highlands of Cameroon and the eastern mountain ranges appears to provide a natural inland corridor north, as well as a coastal escape route south and west.

Without the means to ford wide rivers or traverse high mountains, this corridor provided the means by which countless people and animals over countless years migrated out of Equatorial Africa.

Those who trekked north either followed the banks of the River Nile as it flowed down to the Mediterranean Sea through lands we know now as Sudan and Egypt; or they followed the East African mountain ranges through lands we know now as Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. Taking the latter route, some may have found a pass through the mountain ranges to end up on the shores of the Indian Ocean in the land we know now as Kenya, and trekked from there along the eastern coastline and the Red Sea up to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

Those who trekked west followed the coastline west, and then north, to lands we know now as Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal and Mauritania; and when they reached Morocco, on the western shores of the Mediterranean Sea, they were then able to cross into Europe via Spain - just as they do now.

Fossil evidence, however, shows that the very earliest of the migrants trekked south - following the coastline to lands we know now as Angola, Namibia and South Africa. From the southernmost tip of Africa, it was then possible for them to follow the coastline north up the eastern coast of Africa through lands we know now as Swaziland, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt until they, too, reached the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.