Fig. 5: Travelled distances and migration speed across Sahul.
From: Physiography, foraging mobility, and the first peopling of Sahul
Predictions of travelled distances and speed from the Bird’s Head region10,27,31 in New Guinea to archaeological sites are presented in (a). Similar calculations are performed for the southern entry point into the Kimberley region (Western Australia)2,10 and shown in (b). For each entry point, two scenarios of early humans’ knowledge of their surrounding environment are estimated (i.e., a 25 km radius of landscape awareness and a 50 km radius). The corresponding distances travelled to reach each site are statistically derived and presented as box plots on the left panels. Estimates of migration speed, on the right panels, assume a first arrival time at 73 ka8 for the northern route and at 75 ka for the southern route2. Humans peopling velocities are based on the predicted travelled distances to archaeological sites and the dating age ranges provided in Supplementary Table 3. For the 40 archaeological sites, the sampling size n for the northern and southern routes is obtained from the 5000 paths simulated with each path composed of 10 million walker steps aggregated assuming a 25 or 50 km radius of knowledge. The bounds of the box show the 25 and 75 percentiles in the right panels with the mean and minimum values defined by the green and fuchsia circles respectively. The velocities on the right panels are obtained from the mean and minimum obtained in the left panels assuming a first arrival time and the age ranges provided in Supplementary Table 3.
