History of human migration
Human migration is the movement by people from one place to another, particularly different countries, with the intention of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location.
Since the Neolithic, most migrations (except for the peopling of remote regions such as the Arctic or the Pacific), were predominantly warlike, consisting of conquest or Landnahme on the part of expanding populations.
Involuntary migration includes forced displacement (in various forms such as deportation, the slave trade, flight (war refugees and ethnic cleansing), all of which could result in the creation of diasporas.
Studies show that the pre-modern migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about 1.75 million years ago.
[3][4] It is suggested that modern non-African populations descend mostly from a later migration out of Africa between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago,[5][6] which spread across Australia, Asia and Europe by 40,000 BCE.
[8] Historians see elite-migration parallels in the Roman and Norman conquests of Britain, while "the most hotly debated of all the British cultural transitions is the role of migration in the relatively sudden and drastic change from Romano-Britain to Anglo-Saxon Britain", which may be explained by a possible "substantial migration of Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes into England (contributing 50–100% to the gene pool at that time).
"[9] Early humans migrated due to many factors, such as changing climate and landscape and inadequate food-supply for the levels of population.
The evidence indicates that the ancestors of the Austronesian peoples spread from the South Chinese mainland to the island of Taiwan around 8,000 years ago.
Evidence from historical linguistics suggests that seafaring peoples migrated from Taiwan, perhaps in distinct waves separated by millennia, to the entire region encompassed by the Austronesian languages.
From 180 BCE a series of invasions from Central Asia followed in the northwestern Indian subcontinent, including those led by the Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians and Kushans.
Turkic peoples spread from their homeland in modern Turkestan across most of Central Asia into Europe and the Middle East between the 6th and 11th centuries CE.
Recent research suggests that Madagascar was uninhabited until Austronesian seafarers from present-day Indonesia arrived during the 5th and 6th centuries CE.
to have been populated by Pygmies and Khoisan-speaking people, whose descendants today occupy the arid regions around the Kalahari Desert and the forests of Central Africa.
The Atlantic slave trade diminished sharply after 1820, which gave rise to self-bound contract labor migration from Europe and Asia to plantations.
Immigration restrictions have been developed, as well as diaspora cultures and myths that reflect the importance of migration to the foundation of certain nations, like the American melting pot.
The United States experienced considerable internal migration related to industrialization, including its African American population.
From 1910 to 1970, approximately 7 million African Americans migrated from the rural Southern United States, where black people faced both poor economic opportunities and considerable political and social prejudice, to the industrial cities of the Northeast, Midwest and West, where relatively well-paid jobs were available.
The second largest group were Poles, millions of whom were expelled westwards from eastern Kresy region and resettled in the so-called Recovered Territories (see Allies decide Polish border in the article on the Oder-Neisse line).
Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians (Operation Vistula), Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and some Belarusians were expelled eastwards from Europe to the Soviet Union.
Research by the Overseas Development Institute identifies a rapid movement of labor from slower- to faster-growing parts of the economy.
