Fifty thousand years ago - in the broad span of centuries around 48,000 bce - a new era in human history began.

The fully modern human ancestors of all of us alive today, who had evolved in East Africa and secondarily in northeastern Africa, for the first time advanced outward from the continent. One line of their expansion passed into the Levant and then, in subsequent millennia, west to Europe and eastward toward East Asia. Others of our fully modern ancestors spread contemporaneously, most probably from the Horn of Africa, across the southern fringes of Asia, reaching Australia by or before 42,000 bce. Still others among our common human forebears moved southward and westward from East Africa, into southern Africa and the Congo Basin.