Going East: New Genetic and Archaeological Perspectives on the Modern Human Colonization of Eurasia

Abstract

The pattern of dispersal of biologically and behaviorally modern human populations from their African origins to the rest of the occupied world between ∼60,000 and 40,000 years ago is at present a topic of lively debate, centering principally on the issue of single versus multiple dispersals. Here I argue that the archaeological and genetic evidence points to a single successful dispersal event, which took genetically and culturally modern populations fairly rapidly across southern and southeastern Asia into Australasia, and with only a secondary and later dispersal into Europe.