Human migration started in Africa. As the birthplace of human origin, Africa witnessed many firsts, including history's first great migration, or movement, from one region or country to another. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient Africans made their way to what is now Europe and the Middle East-places where no humans had yet lived. Their pioneering journeys ensured the spread of human culture to other parts of the world. Migration is a fundamental human activity. The very first immigrant of whom we are ware-that African, Eve-was in the process of moving (migrating or returning "home"?), as evidenced by her footprints, still visible after three million years.
There were two great migrations of African-born species, first homo erectus, then homo sapiens. Many complex movements allowed interbreeding and enables homo sapiens to evolve at a number of places at once. Perhaps regional populations of homo erectus evolved into homo sapiens while intermingling with one another. The spread of homo erectus began as much as 1.8 million years ago and homo sapiens' proliferation began around 100,000 years ago. Every American Indian, from the Abenakis of Maine to the Zunis of New Mexico, descended from immigrant stock. The New World, last to be settled, was apparently uninhabited by man until some thirty thousand years ago. (Carl Switsher. How Man Began. Institute of Human Origins Berkeley. Time Magazine, March 14, 1994. P. 82)
Asian-Americans came over 12,000 to 20,000 years ago, probably crossing a glacial land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and deployed throughout the two Americas, creating cultures of great variety and complexity. The human race had peopled almost the entire globe by migration ("The Migrations of Human Populations," Scientific American 231, No. 3, September, 1974: 105).
The several hundred thousand Europeans who came into the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came largely because if what we would now call the populations and/or labor policies developed by the various colonizing powers. The colonial period in American history, from 1607 to the adoption of the Constitution, is almost as long as the history of the United States. But there were not many people here then. Fewer than once million came-some six hundred thousand Europeans and, perhaps, three hundred thousand Africans. Since about half of the Europeans and all of the Africans were, to one degree of another, unfree, the free immigrant was in the minority during the colonial period. But if these numbers seem small, we need to know that the total French immigration to Canada between 1608 and 1760 was fewer than 10,00 persons. 1 (Phillip Curting. The African Slave Trade: A census (1969))
