Migration routes

The earliest migration routes brought human beings out of Africa to the other continents

Migration routes refer to the most widely utilized migratory routes throughout history. Despite the explosion in the world population over the last two and a half centuries since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, 95% of all human beings are concentrated into just 10% of the land on our planet, particularly coastal regions and river valleys in temperate and continental climates. Human beings have always sought such environments as they provide access to water, land that can be farmed and the ability to trade on the world’s seas and oceans. As a result, for thousands of years humans have been crisscrossing the same migration routes very frequently and a number of these have played an outsized role in how we have moved around as human beings.

Migration routes chronology of events

The first major migratory route for Homo sapiens involved travelling out of Africa, where all modern human beings originated, to Eurasia. From there humans migrated ever further. For instance, the first humans arrived to the Americas by migrating to north-eastern Asia and then walking across what are now the Bering Straits to Alaska at a time when these were frozen over during the last Ice Age. Admittedly though these early migratory routes fell quickly out of use once the ice retreated and humans had colonized the continents.

Beyond these prehistoric migratory routes, a number of routes have dominated human movement over the past 4,000 years or so and shaped our history in the process. Of these, surely the most consequential have been the migratory routes across Eurasia. These run from the Asian Steppe north of the Himalayas all the way westwards through the Ural Mountains along the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and into Europe. For millennia people have migrated in huge numbers westwards from the Asian Steppe all the Europe. For instance, most of the Germanic and Asiatic peoples who make up a large proportion of the ethnicity of European people originated from somewhere around the Asian Steppe or westwards north of either the Caspian or Black Sea thousands of years ago. These include, for instance, the Slavic peoples, who originated in Eastern Europe and further to the east in ancient times and migrated into Europe from the fifth century CE onwards. Other groups that arrived in this way include the Magyars, Bulgars and also many of the Germanic peoples who conquered the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE. As such, virtually all modern Europeans and their offshoots in the Americas are in some way descended from people who came from Asia or Eastern Europe along the migratory routes from the Asian Steppe to Europe centuries or millennia ago.

The Turkic people migrated across Asia

An alternative to this latter route runs further south through Central Asia and between the southern end of the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf into the Middle East. Groups such as the Turks and the Mongols came through this region between the eighth and thirteenth centuries and vastly changed the ethnic and cultural landscape of the Middle East and Central Asia in the process.

Coming closer to our own time some of the most extensive human migration has been from Europe to the Americas. On the one hand this might suggest a vast web of migratory routes over and back across the Atlantic Ocean, but actually the reality is less complex. Two main migration routes were used by tens of millions of people who left Europe between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries to live in the western hemisphere. One runs from Northern and Western Europe into the North Atlantic, generally hugging the land as much as possible towards Ireland and Newfoundland until reaching the eastern seaboard of North America. Over time this began to coalesce around a number of key ports on the two sides of the Atlantic such as Liverpool, Bristol, Cork, Amsterdam and London and on the other side Boston, New York and Philadelphia.

Migration routes often follow the world's ocean currents

The other trans-Atlantic migration routes involved Hispanic settlers sailing down the coast of western Africa until they reached the region around Senegal and the Cape Verde Islands and then spiking off west to Brazil. From there they went onwards along the coast of South America to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. It isn’t hard to see why Europeans did this for centuries. These two routes were safer as ships did not have to brave the more tumultuous conditions of the wide Atlantic that they would encounter if they just simply sailed in a straight line from Europe to somewhere like Florida. Furthermore, ships traversing these trans-Atlantic sea routes benefit from the oceans currents carryign them along faster here.

Other migratory routes developed in the nineteenth century as previously unknown parts of the world were opened up to western settlement, notably in Australia and New Zealand, while the Russians reversed the westward trend of migration along the Eurasian routes by sending explorers east and colonizing Siberia from the seventeenth century onwards. Ultimately, with the advent of the airplane and long-haul flights the old migration routes of humanity have become somewhat obsolete and new ones have emerged. For instance, the decision of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to promote their small states as hubs of global transport where planes flying between Europe and Australia and Southeast Asia stop to refuel, means that many modern migration routes run along the lines of London-Dubai-Sydney or Paris-Doha-Bangkok and many other variations of this kind. Similarly, the modern migration routes of a country like the United States are often dependent on where it built its great highways a century ago.

Extent of migration along migration routes

Dubai International Airport

It is impossible to accurately assess how many people have migrated across these routes over the course of human history, though some broad figures are certainly possible. For instance, an estimated sixty million Europeans migrated from the Old World to the Americas between 1492 and 1930. The vast majority of those migrated in the period between 1820 and 1930. An enormous number would have arrived in ships which followed the two major migration routes, one running in an arc upwards towards Newfoundland and then curving back towards Canada and the United States, the other heading south from Europe along the western Africa coastline and then across the mid-Atlantic to the north-eastern end of South America.

More modern routes can also be assessed. As of the early 2020s, over 80 million passengers pass through Dubai International Airport every year. 50 million passengers use Bangkok Airport every year. Similar numbers can clearly be cited for other major international airports and while a majority of these passengers are tourists or temporary travellers, some are people starting new lives in new countries. Similarly, the Chunyun (‘Spring transportation’) period in China in the spring every year after the Chinese New Year, sees 2.9 billion passenger journeys along that country’s modern migration routes, much of it on China’s vast rail network.

Demographic impact of migration routes

The migration which has occurred along these routes has shaped the world as we know it. Almost everyone you will meet in the Americas today is the descendant of someone who passed along a major migration route from Europe, Asia or Africa to the western hemisphere at some point since 1492. The same holds true of Australia and New Zealand. Going back further, the European continent and the Middle East have been vastly altered ethnically by migration from northern Asia. For instance, the Turks originally hailed from somewhere around Siberia. While the ultimate origins of some of the Germanic tribes that conquered countries like France, England, Germany, Italy and Spain in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries CE is not entirely clear, at least some of the groups involved, the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Burgundians, Goths, Suebi and the like must have had origins in Asia and we know that they came from Scandinavia and parts of modern-day Russia. Perhaps this is the most powerful statement about how influential these migration routes have been: most modern-western people have ancestors who lived a long time ago somewhere in northern Asia and some of the furthest corners of Northern and Eastern Europe.

See also

• Immigration to the United States
• Fall of the Roman Empire
• Great Migration
• How to research immigrant ancestors
• Age of Exploration

Explore more about migration routes

• Passenger and Immigration Lists, 1500-1900 record collection on MyHeritage
• Atlantic and Gulf Ports, Passenger List Card Index, 1820-1870 record collection on MyHeritage
• Ellis Island and Other New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 record collection on MyHeritage
• Spanish & Latin American Records on MyHeritage at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Tracing Immigrant Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Ellis Island: How to Research Ancestors Who Passed Through the Gateway to Freedom at the MyHeritage Blog
• What is the PedigreeMap™? on the MyHeritage Help Center
• How do I use the PedigreeMap™? on the MyHeritage Help Center
• MyHeritage Ask The Expert - PedigreeMap™ on the MyHeritage YouTube channel. The pedigree map feature takes the information from your tree and plots it on a map of the world. Learn how to make the most of this feature and review all the information on ancestral places around the world.

References

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