Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 110
This Rainbow Serpent petroglyph from Kakadu may provide a link to the reli-
gious beliefs of the people who fi rst migrated to Australia.
almost 2 million years earlier.
Homo erectus
seems to have stopped in Indone-
sia.
Homo sapiens
went on to New Guinea and Australia.
The modern human journey, like the earlier migration of
H. erectus
, prob-
ably started in Ethiopia, and it started hesitantly. Fossil fi nds by Tim White and
his colleagues show that people much like us were living in Ethiopia 150,000
years ago. And skeletons discovered in the 1930s in Skhul and Qafzeh caves
on the slopes of northern Israel's Mount Carmel show that modern humans
had arrived there by 90,000 years ago.
But genetic evidence shows clearly that it was exceedingly hard for these
small groups of modern humans to move away from the Mediterranean
coast. While there are many dif erent mitochondrial lineages in human pop-
ulations in Africa, the populations that fi rst managed to penetrate beyond
