Human migrations they were given by the search for food and new territories in which they would allow them to survive. Until recently before the Holocene (10 thousand years ago), the human race had suffered insignificant changes in its long pilgrimage of almost a million years and the number of inhabitants did not exceed a million individuals . They were distributed in the Old Continent , forming small family groups, dedicated to hunting, fishing and gathering.
Primitive man, from the remote appearance of him, due to his wandering condition and the great climatic changes that occurred, was slowly moving through all the continental areas that favored his precarious parasitic economy (fishing and gathering). The following events occurred:
- The austrolopithecines they lived in sub-Saharan Africa and never left that area.
- During the Lower Middle Pleistocene (600,000 – 275,000 years ago), the hominids spread from tropical Africa, moving to North Africa and Europe to the East, to China, passing through South Asia.
The oldest fossils of this group belong to the evolutionary stage known as pithecanthropus or Homo Erectus . Its brain dimensions were midway between those of Austrolopithecus and modern man.
- In the Upper Middle Pleistocene (275 thousand – 95 thousand years) with the probable exception of a few surviving pithecanthropes in Java and North Africa, the Homo Sapiens it had been distributed throughout Africa, western and southern Europe (including part of Germany), southern Asia (Arabia, India, and China), and parts of Indonesia.
By then man had adapted to different geographical environments. The primitive Asians and Africans were concentrated in meadows and valleys, while the Europeans in places that were covered with forests.
- In the Upper Pleistocene (95 thousand – 10 thousand years). Neanderthal man is represented by a set of fossil bones discovered in Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, all dating from the early part of the Würn glaciation. Possibly they learned to make their clothes with prepared skins, which allowed them to penetrate the cold regions of Central Asia, up to Uzbekistan.
Between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, men similar to the current ones appeared, Homo Sapiens-Sapiens, who began to replace the Neanderthals, with whom they may have interbred
The new peoples introduced a new type of culture, Upper Paleolithic , whose remains are distributed in the continental areas of Europe, North Africa and South Asia.
Then came the last great human expansion; migrating to the southwest they reached Australia and north to Siberia. From there, through the Bering Strait , then a continental bridge due to glaciations, reached American lands.