When I look at the long distances covered by our ancestors across the Old World and the Americas, I often wonder how long did it take them to trek across the continents. Today I found a paper that modelled how long it took the Neanderthals to move from Western Europe, in the Caucasus, to Altai.
I was surprised to find that it could have taken around 2,000 years.
The paper by Coco E, and Iovita R (2025) (Agent-based simulations reveal the possibility of multiple rapid northern routes for the second Neanderthal dispersal from Western to Eastern Eurasia. PLoS One 20(6): e0325693. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0325693) used a computer simulation to find out how a group of hunter-gatherers would move from a starting point into new territories without any previous knowledge of what lies ahead. The program places "cost barriers" like deserts, glaciers, wider rivers, that slow down progress and require detours or more effort to cross them. The simulation did not consider sites where Neanderthal remains have been found, yet the routes it traced coincide with many of them!. Below is a map from this paper (Fig. 2) of these paths during different periods. The authors consider that advancing and retreating ice shields during glacial periods pushed the Neanderthals into refugia further south, to warmer climates, and that they pushed north during the warmer periods.
The simulations end at Altai, where we know that Denisovans and Neanderthals mixed.
How long did it take?
The paper states that "it is possible that Neanderthal dispersals would have taken slightly longer than 2000 years. However, the model still suggests dispersal could have occurred relatively quickly. Such a dispersal may have left few vestiges along the route, as Neanderthals would have spent relatively little time in any one location."
The authors find that their arrival to Altai was inevitable, forged by the geographic constraints and landscape: "This suggests that Neanderthal dispersal to the Altai is an inevitable outcome of local movement decisions defined by geography."
Further research would be required, in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to locate sites and provide additional data. The paper did not model beyond Altai. I wonder what direction would the simulation take into China, or even towards the northeast, into the tip of Asia and across Bering, into America.<7p>
Could these same paths have been used by the H. Georgicus of Dmanisi, Georgia, in the Caucasus, ~2 million years ago, to reach East Asia?
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