What does one dot on the globe represent?

One excavated locality — a cave, a lakeshore, a gravel bed where hominin fossils or tools have been found and dated. The colour is the species. The size is the population estimate, and where no estimate has ever been published the dot is drawn at a nominal size and marked as such, because the alternative is to invent a number.

Where do the dates come from?

Each date is as published in the paper cited on the dot itself. Where the literature disagrees — Madjedbebe's 65,000 years is the clearest example — the map marks the date contested rather than choosing a side.

Why does the map sometimes show land where there is sea?

Because during a glacial period the sea stood as much as 120 metres lower and the continental shelf was dry. Sunda, Sahul, Beringia and the floor of the North Sea were walkable. The shelf is drawn for glacial intervals in the last 1.2 million years only, because earlier than that the ice-age cycle is not resolved well enough to draw a coastline from.

Did modern humans wipe out the Neanderthals?

They disappeared, and they did not disappear entirely: every living person whose ancestry lies outside sub-Saharan Africa carries about 1.5 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. What ended was the population, not the lineage. The map draws the last appearances and the admixture events as two separate things because they are two separate things.

Does this site track me?

No. There is no account, no form and no upload. Nothing you do here is sent anywhere. Google Analytics loads only if you accept the cookie question, and a refusal makes no request to Google and sets no cookie at all.

Everyone alive is descended from a handful of people who walked out of Africa — and from the species they met on the way.

This is that story on one globe. Every hominin we have a fossil of, where it lived and when. Drag the timeline and watch species appear and disappear — and watch the places where two of them were in the same landscape at the same time, which is not where the word “replaced” usually points.

Six million years · 23 hominins · 123 excavated localities · every date carrying the paper it came from.

300 thousand years ago

Pleistocene

Who was alive, and when

The strip below uses the same scale as the slider, so the vertical line is the moment on the map. A bar is a species' whole known range.

Where they met

Every row below is a place and a window where two hominins were in the same region — and what the evidence says came of it. Press one to fly there.

Who is related to whom

The same twenty-three species, hung on one family tree. A line leaves its parent where the descendant is first seen in the record — not at a genetic split, which is a different and usually earlier thing. A branch the literature is still arguing about is drawn dashed. Press a name to open it.

How much of the genome moved

A share of a genome has been published for only a few of these events, and one of those is published as a phrase rather than a figure. So each row carries what kind of number it is, and where there is nothing to show, it says so instead of showing a zero. Press a row to open the event.

What this map will not do

It will not draw a population it cannot source. Of the localities here, most have no published population estimate at all. Those dots still have to have a size, so they have a nominal one — and the panel says so, in those words, when you open them.
It will not resolve a dispute. Where the literature disagrees, the date is marked contested and both readings are shown. The 65,000-year date for Madjedbebe, in Australia, is the clearest example on this map and is drawn as contested rather than as settled.
It will not show a coastline that was not there. The shading is the sea floor shallower than 200 metres, drawn from a real contour of the sea floor — and it is not a shoreline. At the glacial maxima the sea stood about 120 metres below today, so the coast lay somewhere inside that edge. The shading is drawn only for glacial periods in the last 1.2 million years: further back the ice-age cycle was 41,000 years long and the record is not resolved enough to draw a coast from, so nothing is drawn.
It will not draw a route as a measured path. A route here is a line through dated sites in the order the archaeology reaches them. Nobody walked a straight line from Ethiopia to Java, and a line drawn 1.8 million years long is a summary of a process that took tens of thousands of years.
It will not pretend the record is complete. Whole species on this map are known from a single bone, a single jaw, or from nothing but a statistical signal in living genomes. The ghost population in West Africa has no fossil at all, and it is drawn as a ghost.

The papers behind every date

Each entry below is cited by at least one dot, route or event on this page. Links go to the publisher or the DOI resolver.

Where the pictures came from

Each species is shown by its own picture — the photograph of it that a reader is most likely to have seen, which for most of these species is a skull and for a few is a reconstruction. Every one is free to use and is credited below; the two species with no picture are the two that have no fossil to photograph.

Privacy

This page collects nothing. There is no account, no form, no upload and no server-side storage: the globe is drawn in your browser from data that ships with the page, and the species filter and timeline position live in that tab's memory and are gone when the tab closes.

The one thing that could leave your browser is anonymous measurement. Google Analytics loads only if you accept it. If you refuse, no request is made to Google, no cookie is set, and nothing is recorded — not "cookies disabled", but never loaded. Your answer is kept in this browser's local storage, not in a cookie, and the footer's Cookie settings button changes it at any time.

The map, the coastline data and the three-dimensional library are all served from this domain. Following a citation link to a paper leaves this site and goes to the publisher, which has its own policy.

Last changed: 30 September 2026.