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Homo Sapiens Sapiens Events

After L. David Roper, with thanks

L. David Roper (roperld@vt.edu)
(www.roperld.com)

Dates are approximate.
5,000,000 yrs ago
Hominids separated from other primates
2,000,000 yrs ago
Homo Habilus
1,750,000 yrs ago
Initial hominid exodus from Africa
1,500,000 yrs ago
Homo Erectus
1,000,000 yrs ago
Early hominids in Spain
500,000 yrs ago
Common ancestor of Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis
400,000 yrs ago
Early hominids in China
150,000 yrs ago
Mitochondrial Eve in Africa
100,000 yrs ago
Some Homo sapiens sapiens left Africa into Middle East
71,000 yrs ago
Eruption of Toba, Sumatran Volcano, and the ensuing millennium which killed almost all Homo Sapiens Sapiens (estimate of 10,000 left)
70,000 yrs ago
Some Homo sapiens sapiens left Africa and Middle East for southern coastal Eurasia
60,000 yrs ago
Y-chromosome Adam
50,000 yrs ago
Eurasians separated out from Africans, followed coast lines and arrived in Australia
40,000 yrs ago
Europeans separated out from Eurasians
40,000

yrs ago

Modern humans reached southern Siberia
35,000 yrs ago
Modern humans reached Europe
Earliest paleolithic cave art in 
FumaneCave near VeronaItaly
30,000 yrs ago
First major wave of migration into India from the Middle East
25,000

yrs ago

Paleolithic humans migrated south to southern France and northern Spain because of ice-age cold
20,000 yrs ago
Modern humans reached the Asian Arctic
15,000 yrs ago
Northeast Asians migrated into North America through the BeringStraits, then dry
12,000-10,000 yrs ago
Europe repopulated after Last Glacial Maximum
10,000 yrs ago
Agriculture began in Middle East
8,500 

yrs ago

Earliest known permanent settlement at Jericho in the Middle East
8,200

yrs ago

Huge ice dam broke in northeast North America, which caused the filling of the English channel and much flooding and much colder temperatures for about 300-500 years in western Europe. This caused Europeans to separate into isolated groups. Articles about this: 

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pciesiel/gly3150/glaciation.html

The Europeans left in western Europe are called paleolithic. The eastern Europeans are called neolithic; agriculture developed in this group and they later joined the paleolithic group in western Europe.

7,600

yrs ago

Black Sea flooded with salt water by the breaching of a narrow stip of land by the rising Mediterranean Sea to create the Strait of Bosporus
5500

yrs ago

Wheel invented, in Mesopotamia?
4000

yrs ago

Homo sapiens migrated to PolynesianIslands