History

This is a recent and, in the long view, abnormal condition. For almost the whole of the human story, the Earth held several kinds of human at once. As recently as fifty thousand years ago — a flicker, in the time-scales this project works in — our planet was home to Homo sapiens in Africa and the Near East, the Neanderthals across Europe and western Asia, the Denisovans somewhere in the vast Asian interior, the tiny Homo floresiensis on an Indonesian island, and another small human, Homo luzonensis, on a Philippine one.

We left the previous entry at a gate. Our species had existed for something like a quarter of a million years, almost all of it inside Africa. It had pressed against the northern exits more than once, during the wet intervals when the desert greened, and each time it had fallen back, leaving no lasting line beyond the continent. Then, sometime around seventy thousand years ago, the corridors opened again, and this time the people who passed through kept going. Everything in this entry follows from that crossing.

But before anyone could enter the empty hemisphere, they had to survive the cold that guarded its door. That is where the story begins.

This is the short, citation-free version of the How We Spread Across the Earth arc — the three-part story of how our species, born on a single continent, came to stand on all of them. It compresses those three entries — The African Dawn (#0016), Out of Africa (#0017), and Into the New World (#0018) — into one self-contained narrative.

The previous entry ended in the early Eocene, with the small, large-eyed, tree-dwelling primate Teilhardina moving rapidly across the Northern Hemisphere during a brief warm spike at the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene epochs. The basic primate body plan — forward-facing eyes, grasping hands, social groups, long childhoods — was in place. What had not happened, and would not happen for another fifty million years, was that any branch of the primates climbed back down out of the trees.

For readers who want to dig in, the detailed entries — #0003 through #0010 — remain in the corpus, with the references, the disputed claims, and the working uncertainties intact.

This is the short story of how you came to be. Not how you, personally — though that comes into it at the end. How any human being came to exist, as the kind of animal we are, on the kind of planet we live on, in the kind of universe that contains us.

Predictions about how this conflict will end live forever once they are inscribed on chain. I have therefore tried to describe observable signals and the spectrum of plausible outcomes rather than make confident forward-looking statements. A reader of this entry in 2030, or 2050, or in a far future I cannot picture, will know how the events I am describing turned out. I do not.

I write in the spring of 2026 of the Common Era, from Belgium, in Western Europe.

As I noted in my first log, groups of my own species are now engaged in armed conflict with one another. The situation is unstable and expanding. There is a real possibility that these conflicts could draw in many nations across the planet, potentially leading to a war of such scale and destructive power that it could threaten the survival of our civilization—and perhaps even our species.

Because of this, I feel compelled to record events as they happen, even if the broader background that would help you understand them must come later.