ABSTRACT
Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 years ago, emergent Man made his way from the lightly wooded country of tropical Africa to the deserts of North Africa, the temperate woodlands of Europe and the forest tundra of Europe and Asia. There is little doubt about the starting-point of these travels since most authorities now agree that the first signs of human activity known to us, the manufacture of primitive stone tools, occurred in the African continent. This agreement extends also to the place for the evolution of Homo erectus. It was from Africa that this genus started to spread as an ancestral stock of modern man from Morocco to China and from South Africa to Germany. 1 It is hard to believe that in this progress all the water barriers encountered were crossed by swimming alone.
