What caused the change?
Labs / History
Out of Africa
A single population leaves the East African Rift and spreads across the whole planet. Press play, or scrub the timeline to any moment in the last 100,000 years, then click anywhere on the map to ask when the wavefront first arrived. The Bering land bridge only lets people into the Americas while ice-age seas are low — so try raising the sea level and watch continents stay empty.
Labs / History / Out of Africa
Out of Africa
A single population leaves the East African Rift and spreads across the whole planet. Press play, or scrub the timeline to any moment in the last 100,000 years, then click anywhere on the map to ask when the wavefront first arrived. The Bering land bridge only lets people into the Americas while ice-age seas are low — so try raising the sea level and watch continents stay empty.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
100,000 BPland 0 %site click the map
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Click Australia and then the tip of South America — which one did people reach first, and by how many thousand years?
- Slide the sea level up toward 0 m so the Bering bridge never opens. Do the Americas ever get settled at all?
- If our ancestors had walked twice as fast, would the world fill in half the time — or do the bridges still hold them back?
- Why does Australia get people while the sea is high, but the Americas need the water to drop first?
- Why does southern South America turn out to be the very last place settled, even though it is not the farthest point from Africa in a straight line?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.