The long march of everyman

摘要

"Out of Africa, always something new", wrote Caius Pli-nius Secundus, a Roman polymath who helped to invent the field of natural history. Pliny wrote more truly than he could possibly have realised. For one fine day, somewhere between 85,000 and 60,000 years before he penned those words, something did put its foot over the line that modern geographers draw to separate Africa from Asia. And that something—or, rather, somebody—did indeed start something new, namely the peopling of the world.