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.
This entry is part of a small set of Project Reference entries that orient readers around the corpus rather than telling its story. Earth Log #0013, the first Register of Inscriptions, lists which entries exist and how to verify each one on chain. Earth Log #0014, the first Chapter Summaries, describes what each entry is about in plain prose. This entry explains how to read any of them. Together the three are intended to make the corpus navigable for a reader coming to it cold.
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.