"Journey of Mankind:" 160,000 Years of Ups and Downs

"Journey of Mankind / The Peopling of the World." A flash interactive timeline, showing 160,000 years of migrations, starting in east Africa: a story that's gotten more detailed, now that mtDNA and other investigative tools are available.

It's not the smooth progression that I learned about, back when. About 90,000 years ago, for example, a "global freeze-up" sealed the doom of people who had moved into the Levant and north Africa. The eruption of Mt. Toba, about 74,000 years back, was worse: six years of "nuclear winter," followed by a thousand-year mini-ice age nearly killed us off.