On the basis of fossil and archaeological data it has been hypothesized that the exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa and into Eurasia between ∼50-120 thousand years ago occurred in several orbitally paced migration episodes. Crossing vegetated pluvial corridors from northeastern Africa into the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant and expanding further into Eurasia, Australia and the Americas, early H. sapiens experienced massive time-varying climate and sea level conditions on a variety of timescales. Hitherto it has remained difficult to quantify the effect of glacial- and millennial-scale climate variability on early human dispersal and evolution. Here we present results from a numerical human dispersal model, which is forced by spatiotemporal estimates of climate and sea level changes over the past 125 thousand years. The model simulates the overall dispersal of H. sapiens in close agreement with archaeological and fossil data and features prominent glacial migration waves across the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant region around 106-94, 89-73, 59-47 and 45-29 thousand years ago. The findings document that orbital-scale global climate swings played a key role in shaping Late Pleistocene global population distributions, whereas millennial-scale abrupt climate changes, associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events, had a more limited regional effect. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.

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archaeological evidence Mediterranean Region island (geological) Eurasia Human Migration adaptation Australia Population Dynamics sea level change human Asia time factor global climate priority journal Time Factors Fossils Central America Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle climate Spatio-Temporal Analysis North America Humans evolution Islands South America paleoclimate spatiotemporal analysis Africa Climate change Seawater theoretical model Models, Theoretical Article history climate variation migration simulation population migration sea water Arabia fossil archeology Homo sapiens Pleistocene Arabian Peninsula archaeology sea Levant sea level History, Ancient Upper Pleistocene Oceans and Seas gene flow phenotype