Out Of Africa...

[sandyRoe]

When our early ancestors left East Africa to settle in the Middle East and then Europe why did they keep going? There must have been plenty of unoccupied land in those pre historic days.
What, for example, would have guided their feet to Terra del Fuego?

[jomifl]

The neighbours.

[wolf63]

They were lost and no doubt the males would not allow the group to stop and ask for directions.

[Peter Pedant]

Mosaic used to lecture on this so perhaps she will tell ....

population pressure I would have thought
( usual principles of ( chemical ) diffusion is down a gradient )
so humans tended to go where there werent any... that would give them an evolutionary advantage over those who stayed put.

[aelmpvw]

the grass is always greener ...

[Samuraisan]

A yappy dog next door.

[bookbinder]

They'd heard about the generous benefits system in Britannia.

[magpie]

i take it that this is in response to prof alice's bbc4 prog last night? i presume that they were searching for lands that were similar to where they came from, but couldn't find. when they had travelled all that distance they could not face returning home. as a side story, when settlers first arrived in australia they crowded around the rocks area of sydney, they must have thought that australia wasn't as big as it is. so we may be curious but sometimes we think small in our endeavours.

[Mosaic]

One of the hypotheses offered to explain migration patterns is that rather than everyone processing in a group like a football crowd crossed with the Clampetts, small numbers of explorers actually go to the absolute limits of their known world, and those that follow on do so in a kind of leap-frogging pattern.
Part of this might be have been due to migrants claiming land and refusing room to migrants following on behind.
These hypotheses are based on observations of modern phenomena, for example pioneers in the Midwest.
Then there are factors that we can only guess at, but which have driven migration in historic times and could have operated in the distant past - for example, inheritance patterns, and religious belief.
Welsh inheritance patterns meant numerous sons were left with no useable farmland so had to migrate to survive, or become slaves (5th - 12th centuries AD and later). The Pilgrim Fathers trek to the New World is a good example of religiously-driven migration to a distant and unknown destination.

[atalanta]

The earliest ancestors were not the settling kind. They had not developed farming. They probably took the fruits and the prey they could get until it was time to move on to what they hoped would be richer pastures. Settling, farming and looking after animals came much later.

[jomifl]

Atalanta, I think you have hit the nail on the head. Most of the migrations took place very early in man's history when people just roamed to wherever the living was easier.

[sandyRoe]

I was thinking that population pressures wouldn't have played much of a part. Even as late as the time of The Black Death I believe the
Population was only about 8 million in Great Britain.
I guess hunter gatherers played a part, and maybe man's insatiable appetite to strive to seek, to find, was a cause, too.